


Dialogic: Season 5

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Dialogic [7]
Category: Castle
Genre: Birthday, Christmas, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Holidays, Jealousy, Marriage Proposal, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-07-30 22:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 22,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20104333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: After watching around to the end of the series (i.e., "Hollander's Woods," because nothing after that exists), and taking some time to watch a few other things during workouts, I'm back around to the beginning of the series again.This story is 24 brief sketches, one for each episode of Season 5, inspired by a line of dialogue from the episode.I did the same thing for Seasons 1, 2,  3, and 4 but there's no reason you couldn't read this story (or any chapter of any of these stories) independent of the others.





	1. Adolescent—After the Storm (5 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a kind of shy, awkward rhythm that’s crept into the way they talk to each other over the last two days. God, it’s only been two days, and already it feels like two very different kinds of eternity.

* * *

_“The instinct of a sophomore in high school.”  
—Kate Beckett, After the Storm (5 x 01)_

* * *

****There’s a kind of shy, awkward rhythm that’s crept into the way they talk to each other over the last two days._ God,_ it’s only been two days, and already it feels like two very different kinds of eternity.

In the good eternity—the _fantastic_ eternity—that he’s intent on tethering himself to, and her along with him, the way they talk is different. It’s shy, even in the wake of her shocking bit of manhandling in the elevator. By the time they reach the precinct lobby, there’s silence. Out on the street, there’s an inordinate amount of mumbling and close examination of the toes of one another’s shoes.

“I don’t know if—” he begins.

“—I mean, you don’t have to.” She seems to be ending, and he hasn’t the faintest idea what he missed.

“I want to!” he rushes back in. He doesn’t know what it is he’s enthusiastically committing to as his heart’s desire, but if she’s offering, it totally is. “I definitely … want to what?”

She laughs, a clear crystal thing with her head tipped back. She rolls her eyes, a deeply familiar gesture with something extra on it. It’s a two-fer he guesses. A little exasperation for him, a little for herself. “Come over. Come home. With me.”

“Yes. Absolutely. Yes.” He nods like a drinking duck, then catches a whiff of himself on the evening breeze. His neck and scalp are suddenly, appallingly itchy. “Except no.” His eyes go wide as her face falls. “I mean yes, but not right away. I mean … I should change my clothes.”

“You’re wearing …” A crease appears between her brows. Confusion blossoms into something like alarm and he considers throwing himself out into traffic. “You’re wearing yesterday’s clothes. You were wearing yesterday’s clothes. In my apartment. At … at the crack of dawn?” It’s full-blown panic. “Castle. Ryan and Esposito were there!”

“They didn’t notice!” he says quickly as he does a panicked mental review of the morning. He doesn’t think they noticed. After all, the three of them were fairly preoccupied.

“Castle, they’re detectives!” She throws up her hands. “How could they not notice?”

“Well, I didn’t think we were at the go-through-your-drawers-to-borrow-something stage yet.” It comes out somewhere between a lame joke—a very lame joke—and a sharp rejoinder. 

“I was gone,” she says immediately. She curls her hands into fists. Her shoulders hunch, and he feels like an ass for letting the anger slip out. “Castle, I had to—I needed to take that gamble with Bracken, and if I waited, if I thought about everything I have to lose now …”

“I get it.” The breath he draws in goes on something of a wild ride down his ribs and rebounding off the rise of his stomach. He’s something she has to lose now. _They _are something she has to lose, and that’s exhilarating. And terrifying. It makes him shy and makes him want to climb a lamppost and shout about it. He settles for shooting a furtive look from side to side and hooking his pinky around hers for the briefest of moments. She meets his gaze, and he sees sharpness there, too. He sees the same kind of anger and hurt about his recently revealed choices, but shyness and exhilaration, too. “I understand,” he says, leaning into the word. “But can we do—can we each try not to go rogue without the other?”

“We can.” She’s staring down at the toes of his shoes again, but the nod is firm. Her tone is firm. “We should try that.”

“So.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. He feels color in his cheeks. “Can I still … I mean, I’d like to still … if _you_ still.”

“I do. Still.” She frowns. She reaches out to tug his sleeve and give the wrinkles in his button-down the once over. “You really think they didn’t notice?”

“They really didn’t.” He shakes his head, sure of it now. “I mean Ryan I get. I don’t think Jenny’s gotten around to The Talk yet, but Esposito?”

“Go home, Castle,” she laughs. She drops his sleeve and gives him a push. “Hurry up and go home.” She turns and sets out at trot toward the subway entrance. She glances over her shoulder a few steps on and sees him still standing there. “Hurry!” 

“Hurrying.” He’s dry mouthed and shy as he sets of in a trot of his own. “Definitely hurrying.”


	2. Both/And—Cloudy With A Chance of Murder (5 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s really not one for games of Catch Me If You Can. That’s not what this is about. Pulling away a hair’s breadth from a kiss. Pointedly leaving him behind at the precinct without so much as a second glance. It’s not about checking to see if he’ll chase. She’s not playing games.

> _“You took that punch for me.”   
—Javier Esposito, Cloudy with a Chance of Murder (5 x 02) _

* * *

She’s really not one for games of _Catch Me If You Can._ That’s not what this is about. Pulling away a hair’s breadth from a kiss. Pointedly leaving him behind at the precinct without so much as a second glance. It’s not about checking to see if he’ll chase. She’s not playing games.

Except she stops in the hall, halfway to the bedroom and looks down at herself. She takes in the boxy lines of the nightshirt she’d yanked on after kicking her work clothes off to the back of beyond. She looks down at the fuzzy toes of her wooliest socks and feels the brush of her _headed-for-bed _ponytail at her shoulder. It’s a look that so obviously proclaims that she wasn’t expecting company—she wasn’t expecting _him_—that it comes right out the other side.

She was expecting him.

She’s _still _expecting him. She’s halfway to the bedroom, and she knows he’s still standing where she left him. She’s just about had it with herself. She’s not playing games, except apparently she kind of is. She turns on a wooly heel and marches back down the hall to the kitchen.

“Castle—“

He’s on the phone. He grimaces and holds a finger to his lips.

“What?” he says quickly. “No, no that was no one. It was … that was the TV. Sat on the remote.”

His eyes squeeze shut. There’s a long pause. He nods occasionally. Tries to break in even more occasionally, but it’s a while before that happens. 

“Alexis, it was nothing.” She can’t make out what his daughter is saying, but it’s rapid fire, and the tone is decidedly unhappy. “It was a publicity thing, and I won’t be seeing her—” Alexis cuts in again. “Yes. Completely miserable and there’s no chance.” He rubs his forehead with his free hand. “Okay. Yes. You and Gram have a great time today. I’m glad you called. Love you.”

He ends the call. The sudden silence swells and presses in on her.

“I guess she saw …” she trails off.

“She saw. Or heard or read or whatever.” He hefts the phone in his hand, not making eye contact. “So I got an earful.”

“For not telling her?” she asks uncertainly. He’s been blasé about not telling his family about them. At least she thought that he was being blasé. But if his kid is giving him grief about not sharing about date he clearly got backed into making, maybe not so blasé.

“Among other things,” he says in a way that sounds like that’s the end of it, but then he goes on. “She’s disappointed in me for not being …” He makes a broad gesture. “Beyond the Kristinas of the world.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. It’s more sympathy than apology, and she’d sort of like to have the words back and give it another go.

“Yeah, well.” He tries to wave it away, but his knuckles are white around the phone. “The results are in: Two out of two people surveyed think I should’ve said no on air.” 

“Yeah.” That comes out in a flare of anger, but it’s anger studded with any number of things she’s not in a hurry to examine too closely. “Yeah, you should have, but …” She scowls down at her stupid, wooly socks. “But I get”—she has to swallow hard—“I _sort of _get why you didn’t.”

“Kate.” He stuffs the phone in his pocket and reaches for her hands. She has them tucked behind her, though, and she hesitates for a moment, before she hooks the tips of her fingers loosely around his. “We don’t need to rehash.”

“Not rehash,” she says quickly. “This was …_ is _… harder than I thought.” She curls her fingers, grabbing hold of more of his. “Going back to work, not telling the people we care about.”

“It’s not easy,” he agrees.

He leaves it at that, and she knows there’s a future conversation coming. She thinks about taking it up now. She thinks about her all-or-nothing instincts—avoid or run at something head- on—and knows there’s time for that part of things later, just as she knows this is something she needs to get to now.

“Before—“ Her head dips forward. She smiles to herself, because there really is no before. This is a first. _He_ is a first. “Before, when I was with someone, I could just … mostly not talk about it at work, because it was nobody’s business.”

“But I’m everybody’s business.” He puffs his chest up, trying to make her laugh. Trying to take a little bit of the charge out of things, because he can be _head-on_ or_ avoid,_ too. 

“You’re my_ partner.”_ She squeezes his hand a little viciously. “And I want you to keep being my partner. I want us to get to keep working together and I want us to get to be together.”

“Greedy, huh?” His voice is a little thick. It’s at odds with the teasing words. 

“Ambitious,” she says. She lifts her chin and tugs him toward her. “I’ve gotten ambitious.”


	3. Blueshift—Secret’s Safe With Me (5 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She calls sooner, rather than later that night. He’s only just finished carrying the boxes Alexis left behind up to her room, one by one. He’s only just had a bit of a mope at the mostly bare walls and the hollow sound the closet door makes when he closes it, and the phone is ringing in his pocket.

> “I’m here, and you’re there.”  
—Alexis Castle, Secret’s Safe With Me (5 x 03)
> 
> * * *

She calls sooner, rather than later that night. He’s only just finished carrying the boxes Alexis left behind up to her room, one by one. He’s only just had a bit of a mope at the mostly bare walls and the hollow sound the closet door makes when he closes it, and the phone is ringing in his pocket.

_“How bad is it?”_ she asks before he can even say hello. There’s the tinny hint of an echo to her voice and he hears the curiously muffled sound of traffic just beyond it. She’s calling from the car. She didn’t even wait to get home to check on him, and his heart does a grateful little_ thump–thump _at the thought. 

“Agonizing,” he says as he makes his way down the stairs. He throws every bit of dramatic flair at his disposal into the words. “Miserable. Desolate. I am in need of immediate and intense consolation, Beckett.”

_“That bad, huh?”_ Her laugh starts off distant, then comes close enough to rumble the speaker in his ear, and he pictures the smooth motion of her head as she peers over one shoulder to check her blind spot, nosing the car expertly into a sliver of space to just make it through a light. _“I guess it’s a good thing you have Martha there.” _

“Good thing?” he sputters as he moves around the living room, the kitchen, the dining area. He busies himself—his hands, his body—with straightening up and tidying things away. He busies his mind playing up the drama, even though, honestly, coming home to a slightly emptier loft hasn’t been the swirling descent into moping he’d braced himself for. “Do you know she threatened me? She threatened to stay here. Forever!”

_“Threatened?” _she laughs again. He can hear it more clearly now. The traffic sounds have pulled way back. He absently wonders where she is._ “I’d have thought you’d be grateful, Castle. Aren’t you the one who hates change?” _

“I don’t hate change,” he protests. “Not_ all _change.” He smiles as he opens a kitchen drawer and finds two piles of dish towels, neatly stacked side by side—the fancy microfiber ones he likes and the simple flour sack ones she bought, because she swears that his leave fuzz in her coffee cup. _As if._ “Just the upsetting kind.”

_“And what kind of change qualifies as upsetting?” _

There’s half a second in the middle that’s devoid of sound. It chops the question in half and belatedly grabs his attention. He stops in the act of folding one of the four or five blankets still lying around the living room in the aftermath of Alexis’s eleventh hour moping. He hears footsteps in the hall, footsteps in his ear. He hears strangely doubled nothing, then the echo of the door buzzer ringing here and there.

“What? Kind?” he stutters as he yanks the door open. She’s there on the other side. She’s here, phone still pressed to her ear, with a slightly uncertain smile on her face. “Not this kind.”

He lets the phone drop from his shoulder into his hand. He shoves it into his pocket and pulls her inside. He hears his mother calling out from upstairs. He hears her footsteps moving along the hallway and feels Kate straighten her spine and take a sharper-than-usual breath. He slips an arm around her waist and brushes a sideways kiss over her cheek. 

“This kind is not upsetting,” he murmurs as his mother descends on the two of them in a flutter of bright silk. “Definitely not upsetting.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hopefully on the six thousandth try this stupid thing will post. I think tumblr and the universe are sending me a sign that this experiment is pretty dried up.


	4. R&D—Murder He Wrote (5 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s asleep the moment that he kisses her goodnight. He settles her beside him, like always. He tucks the blankets around her and makes a show of cradling her neck gently as he plumps the pillow behind her head. He goes through his funny, gallant little rituals, like always, ending with two kisses—Goodnight, Detective. Goodnight Kate—and he drops off the next moment.

> _“The weekend hadn’t turned out exactly as Detective Heat had imagined …”   
—Kate Beckett, Murder, He Wrote (5 x 04)_

* * *

****He’s asleep the moment that he kisses her goodnight. He settles her beside him, like always. He tucks the blankets around her and makes a show of cradling her neck gently as he plumps the pillow behind her head. He goes through his funny, gallant little rituals, like always, ending with two kisses—_Goodnight, Detective. Goodnight Kate_—and he drops off the next moment.

She expects to follow in short order. She almost always does. It’s a recent luxury—sleep that’s quick to come and built to last, and it’s intimately linked to being with him. It’s not just the sex, either. The sex definitely doesn’t_ hurt _on the instant quality sleep front, but even on the nights they’re both too exhausted—even on the nights they spend apart—sleep comes to stay right after those two kisses, in person or ridiculously smacked against the phone screen, and those four whispered words.

_Goodnight, Detective. Goodnight, Kate. _

But tonight, it doesn’t come. She keeps her eyes closed and listens to him breathe beside her. She feels the warmth of his skin and the pleasant fit of their bodies. Her limbs are heavy and her spine is soft. The mattress is heavenly and the sheets and blankets are the perfect weight. She should have long since drifted off, but she hasn’t.

And she’s not going to.

Her eyes seem to open of their own accord. There’s an itch in the middle of her back. Her feet shift. The motion ripples through her body until she’s flopping on to her side, as though it’s a matter of getting comfortable. It’s death. Moving is death to sleep for all time. That’s what the specter of insomnia hisses in her ear, and just like that, she’s_ Awake._

She fights it awhile. She squeezes her eyes shut again and wills herself still, but it’s no use. She slips from the bed before things can get to the teeth-gritting, pillow-punching stage. Before she can wake him.

She finds his robe tossed on the armchair and slips it on. She shivers. She’s not cold, she’s exhausted and at a loss. She stands, undecided, in the dark of the room that feels familiar, even though it isn’t really. Not yet. She listens to him breathe and wants badly to climb back beside him. She wants to believe the magic will work this time, but she knows herself. She knows the restless feeling pinging along her nerves.

She thinks about the balcony that’s just steps away. She thinks about curling up on the _chaise longue_ and taking in the stars until she’s sleepy, but her feet have other ideas. They pad their way across the room to where the rug gives way to hard wood gives way to threshold, hallway, stairs. She finds herself standing before the perfectly framed view of the ocean.

She moves quietly through the door and on to the porch. The wind is delicious in her hair and on her skin. It whips the soft fabric of his robe around her calves like a wild, kindred spirit, and she follows it to the bottom of the steps. She sinks down. She wraps one arm around the newel post, as though she needs an anchor, and lets roar of the ocean do its work.

Thoughts percolate up through her mind, some good, some bad. She smiles to herself as she thinks about Alexis and Martha browbeating him for not having A Plan. She lets her breath catch and lets the notion that it matters to her—it _matters_—that his family knows now, and they’re excited for the two of them. She shakes her head about Esposito and Ryan and feels a twinge over keeping Lanie in the dark.

She lets herself turn over a few rocks that have some creepy crawly things beneath them. Anxiety, uncertainty, worry. None of them are about him, not really. They’re about this. About mansions and tawdry Hamptons stories. About _arrangements,_ and a world that she hasn’t felt exactly at home in.

That’s mostly what the creepy crawly things are about, though she pushes on that a little. She prods and probes, and tries to come at things sideways, whatever it is that has her eyes wide open tonight.

“Kate?”

She doesn’t startle when he appears behind her, though she wasn’t expecting him. She certainly didn’t hear him, and yet it’s right that he’s there—he appears—exactly at that moment. 

“Castle.” She tips her head up to smile at him. “I’m sorry. Were you looking all over?” She she should get up. She should go to him, but her hand stretches up and back of its own volition.

He comes down to join her. He settles in next to her. His hair is standing on end and his shirt’s on inside out, but he’s warm and rumpled and a perfect fit.

“No,” he says. He looks confused for a second, then his face smooths out. He smiles. “First try. My favorite, remember?”

“Your favorite,” she says. She likes the idea that it’s part of what drew her here specifically—the fact that she knows this really is his favorite part. Privacy and the call of the ocean, not the parties and polo semi-finals. 

“Everything ok?” he asks after a minute.

“Just a little …” She trails off, not sure what she meant to say, then suddenly exactly sure what part of it is, and it’s so simple. “A little end-of-vacation blues.” She bumps her way under his arm.

“Busman’s holiday,” he says sheepishly. He kisses her hair. “I obsessed. I’m sorry.”

“Not like you had to twist my arm,” she mumbles into his shoulder. She lets troublesome thoughts come and go. “We’ll just have to try again.”

“We will. We’ll come back and try again.” He sounds convinced. He sounds sleepy, and she is too. “Whenever you want.”

“Soon,” she says, her whisper all but lost in the roar of the ocean. “We’ll come back soon.” 

_A/N: Long one. Oops. _


	5. Search and Rescue—Probable Cause (5 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s somehow night again. One has passed in dark, frantic activity on the bridge, and the day has followed, swallowed up by the the things that need doing. Paperwork from an ADA who seems to think he got himself set up for a horrific murder by a psychopath specifically to cause her trouble. Ditto the ragged ends of the 3XK task force, who don’t believe any more than Beckett does that anyone could have survived the fall, yet they still seem to find him a convenient target for their resentment that they can’t definitively draw a line through Tyson’s name.

> _“What do you mean he’s with you?”  
—Javier Esposito, Probable Cause (5 x 05)_

* * *

****It’s somehow night again. One has passed in dark, frantic activity on the bridge, and the day has followed, swallowed up by the the things that need doing. Paperwork from an ADA who seems to think he got himself set up for a horrific murder by a psychopath specifically to cause her trouble. Ditto the ragged ends of the 3XK task force, who don’t believe any more than Beckett does that anyone could have survived the fall, yet they still seem to find him a convenient target for their resentment that they can’t definitively draw a line through Tyson’s name.

It’s all taken an unimaginable amount of time, but it’s night again. They’re parked beneath a streetlight in an unfamiliar car on loan from the precinct’s motor pool. They’re looking up at the lights blazing in the loft. They’re not looking at one another.

“It’s a weird favor to do,” he says, less to break the silence than because his filter seems even more broken than usual.

“Favor?” She turns to him with a puzzled look.

“Tyson’s … disappearing act.” He chooses his words carefully. He doesn’t have it in him to argue his point again. Not with her. “Took up a whole night, so I didn’t …”

“So you didn’t have to face going back,” she finishes quietly. “You don’t have to go back tonight if you don’t want to.”

“Are you inviting me for a sleepover, Detective?”

It’s not a leer. It’s not even an attempt at a leer, but it coaxes out the pale imitation of a smile from each of them. Hers fades first, though.

“They’ll do my place, too.”

It sounds like she’s apologizing. He nods quickly. He covers her her hand to let her know that he already knows. That he’s already thought of how wide a net Tyson cast. How deep into their lives his hooks were sunk without them realizing a thing.

“Your place. My place.” He stares at the roof of the loaner car, wondering about the drag lines in the cheap fabric. “Think we can buy something new in the middle of the night in Manhattan? I’ve got the money.” He lets his head loll toward her. “Or I will once my accounts aren’t frozen any more.”

“It’ll get better.” She turns her hand over to let her fingers slide between his. “It’ll be hard for a while, but it’s still home. It will still be home.”

“I know.” He squeezes her hand. He thinks about Maddox and before that Lockwood and before that Dunn. He knows she knows this kind of violation first hand already, and now here it is again—here’s Tyson—taking from her as much as it is from him. Souring things that should be private, wonderful, _sacrosanct. _“I know it will get better.”

He can feel the weight of her gaze on his profile. He knows she wants to tell him that at least it’s over. She wants him to believe that at least they’re done looking over their shoulders. He thinks he knows every last thing running through her mind, but she surprises him.

“It doesn’t have to get better tonight.” She shakes off his fingers and goes for her phone. She hesitates with her thumb over the screen. “Are you … how about we don’t go home right away?”

“Okay?” He looks at her confused. He’s not firing on all cylinders right now, and it honestly didn’t occur to him that they don’t have to go home—to anyone’s home with its fingerprint powder and everything out of order—right now. “Yeah. Okay.”

She calls Lanie as she pulls away from the curb. She speaks in low, curt sentences he can’t really follow, and he can just hear Lanie responding in kind. She drops the phone into the driver’s side door well. They’re silent as the car glides through the streets to pull up in front of the Old Haunt. She cuts the engine and turns to him with a worried frown. He catches her hand and dots her fingertips with a kiss.

“Good idea,” he murmurs.

She slips her arm around his waist as he comes around the car. He shoots her a surprised look at the unexpected PDA, but she holds fast as they make their way down the stairs and into the bar. She lets go and nudges him toward the back as she stops to confer with the bartender.

He claims one of the big, curved booths and slides around to the top of the U-shape. He hears a ruckus near the doors and sees Lanie and the boys flocking around her. They each grab a waiting beer. Kate grabs two, and they make their way back.

Lanie slips in next to him, bickering with Esposito as he jostles too close to her. Kate slides in on his other side and Ryan takes the end opposite his partner. There’s something awkward beneath the good-natured ribbing and talking over each other. His exhausted, struggling brain has just about grabbed a hold of it when Beckett’s voice cuts through the chatter.

“Guys,” she says sharply. Some stupid insult of Esposito’s bleeds into the moment. _“Guys,” _she says again. She looks nervous. She has a tight hold on her pint glass. “We … Castle and I are together.”

Esposito looks at her like she’s lost her mind. “Yeah, we—_OW!” _

There’s a record-scratch moment as the whole bar hears Lanie’s booted foot make solid contact with his shin under the table. Kate manages a glare at him and a smile at Lanie in one magnificent facial expression.

“We’re obviously not advertising it, but we wanted to tell you before—“ she falters for the first time. She lets the pint glass go and reaches for his hand. “Before you all found out some other way.”

The table dissolves into predictable chaos. There’s scolding from Lanie and backslapping from the boys. There’s shouting, swaggering insistence they each of them totally knew—each of them can tell with pinpoint accuracy exactly when it was inevitable, exactly when the two of them gave in to passion, as Ryan says with the absolute sincerity of three rounds in him.

It’s the moment they should have had, tipping their secret to their closest friends. It’s the moment that she’s stolen back for them, right out of Tyson’s cold dead-or-not-dead hands.

“Thank you,” he whispers, his voice not quite lost in the chaos. He kisses her cheek and smiles hard at the catcalls that rise up. She smiles hard, too. “Thank you for making it better tonight.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Another overly long one; I almost ended this with just Caskett talking in the car, but I hate that their chosen family finds out about their relationship through Tyson—so, probably ill-advised fix-it fic.


	6. Effusive—The Final Frontier (5 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He won’t shut up about Nebula-9. At first, she thinks he’s punking her.

> _I feel so tingly.”   
—Richard Castle, The Final Frontier (5 x 06)_

* * *

He won’t shut up about _Nebula-9._ At first, she thinks he’s punking her.

“That’s it?” he yells as the end credits come up for the last time. “But what about … “ He rattles off sixteen or seventeen different plot points he swears the series has set up and moans about being left hanging. He must be punking her.

“Ha ha, Castle,” she says, grumpily swiping at the crusty corners of her eyes. She’s been dozing for longer and longer stretches since about episode nine. “You get a gold star for good behavior. You didn’t make fun, but this is overdoing it.”

“Overdoing?” He looks incredulous. “Beckett, I’m serious. I need to know what the weapons tech—“

“Carnod,” she interjects. She can’t help interjecting. She wishes she could, because she is ready to put the DVDs back on the shelf for a good long while, and he won’t shut up about _Nebula-9._

“Carnod. Right! It’s a good name.” He chews that over. “And he’s thirteen percent Creaver?” He looks to her for confirmation.

“He’s no percent Creaver.” She grabs the back of her head and pulls her knees up. She’s sideways in the chair, shout-mumbling into her own ribs. It’s a million o’clock and she’s tired. She wants everyone, including herself—especially herself—to stop talking about _Nebula-9, _but information just keeps welling up. “Epigenetic experiments performed on the children at his orphanage—“

“But he has a triumvir!” he interrupts. “It was the guy—the thing—the parent—the one he inherited those gill things behind his ears from—who manipulated him into hiding—“

“Nodair. Who left their other two tryst mates, which is why Carnod was in the orphanage.” She flops backward in the wide leather chair, her head tipped back hopelessly over the arm and her limbs flung wide. “Where they were performing experiments that led to mimicking Creaver bioprint codes under stress.”

“Right,” he mutters. He launches himself out of his own chair and roots around the desk for pen and paper. “Right. Which sets up the secret faction of functionaries as the Big Bad somewhere down the road.”

“Are you …” She finds herself suddenly swallowing hard. She finds tears pricking at the corners of her eyes as she stares up at the ceiling. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No?” He stops what he’s doing immediately. She hears a drawer roll shut and suddenly his face is upside down, hovering over her. “I’m not making fun.“ He drops to the floor, rolling so his back is against the chair, his head resting against her thigh. “I’m ruining it, though, aren’t I?”

“You’re not ruining it,” she says. It’s not exactly gracious. “But you said you hated it. You said it was cheesy and melodramatic and—“

“I know.” He captures one of her hands. He kisses it briefly, then plays with her fingers, tapping the tips of his against the tips of hers the way he does when he’s thinking through something he’s writing. “And it is. But it’s … when I look at it like you looked at it back when it was on, it’s not just cheesy.” He sneaks in another kiss. “And I … I like to like things,” he says, so low and quick that the words are almost lost, even in the quiet of his office in the middle of the night. 

“You like to like things,” she repeats, slowly. It’s true. She thinks about lollipops that taste like soap and niche graphic novels. She thinks about the way he leans eagerly forward to drink in the most mundane stories that have nothing to do with anything. He likes to like things. It’s a fundamental_ truth _about him that takes up a warm little place in the center of her chest. She feels a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Her fingers slide into his hair and she turns his face up to share it with him, this not-so-secret secret about who he is. “I like that you like to like things.” 

“Good,” he smiles back. He shoves at her legs to make room for himself in the chair. “That’s good. Because I have, like, a _million _questions.”


	7. Rendezvous—Swan Song (5 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks she must have gone home. When the music stops and fifty percent of Holy Shemp, version 2.0, along with special guest star Javier Esposito, take their bows, she’s nowhere to be found. He assumes she must have just seen an opening and slipped out while everyone was focused on Buck’s feel-good ending and the fulfillment of James’s last wish.

> _“Detective Beckett’s working an angle right now, Sir.”  
—Javier Esposito, Swan Song (5 x 07)_
> 
> * * *

He thinks she must have gone home. When the music stops and fifty percent of Holy Shemp, version 2.0, along with special guest star Javier Esposito, take their bows, she’s nowhere to be found. He assumes she must have just seen an opening and slipped out while everyone was focused on Buck’s feel-good ending and the fulfillment of James’s last wish.

He gets it. Intellectually—logically—he gets it: She’s an intensely private person, she’s a professional to the _n_th degree, and this constant surveillance has been an assault on all sides of her. So he gets it—intellectually, logically—why she’d slip out without so much as a goodbye, especially given the bullet they’d dodged with Gates and the magically, mercifully missing tape. She’s simple gone off in search of privacy, peace, solitude at last.

Emotionally and paradoxically (and probably a little bit childishly), he thinks there’s no reason at all he can’t be an integral part of her privacy, peace, and solitude at last. Not intellectually—_not_logically—it bums him out that she’d take off without so much as a text to let him know.

If she _did _take off.

His Beckett sense suddenly tingles and he’s not convinced she has, even though she’s nowhere to be found. He checks and rechecks: One of the camera guys is _also _nowhere to be found. It’s suspicious to say the least.

He peels off from the group still applauding and backslapping in the bullpen. He tries to, but Esposito claws at his shoulder. 

“Come on, Castle” he crows. “Those harmonies were tight. You wanna change your tune about me being able to sing or what?”

He’s muttering some half-assed affirmation that is definitely not getting the job done, when Ryan, bless his sweater-vested heart, brings up the karaoke debacle. The ensuing fight draws a crowd. More important, it draws the attention and the all-seeing eye of the other cameraman.

He succeeds in peeling off this time, but once he’s clear of the bullpen’s sight lines, he’s at a loss. She’s gone, and he kind of thinks she wouldn’t just go home without saying good night. One of the camera guys is gone, too, and the two pieces of evidence leave him with no kind of road map.

He doesn’t need a road map, as it turns out. Hands appear from nowhere and jerk him through a doorway into something close to absolute darkness.

“Hi,” she breathes. She has her fists curled in his shirt front and their toes are knocking together in the tight space. “It’s me,” she adds, unnecessarily.

“Beckett?” he whispers also unnecessarily. He’d know her scent and shape and commanding, slightly terrifying presence anywhere. “Wh—what are you doing … in a supply closet?” The location is a bit of a guess. There’s a scent of rubber bands warring with soap and lotion and her, and the very small amount of floor space is clear, suggesting neatly stacked shelves all around them.

“Getting … _away.”_ Her tone is an odd mixture of brittle frustration and breathless collusion.

“With me?” He is full of dumb things to say right now. There’s a warning tug on his shirt front. “Well, _obviously_ with me.” He’s trying to throw a little swagger into it, but it’s one hundred percent _golly gee, she picked me!_ “But, is this a good—“ A thump interrupts before he can say his third really dumb thing inside a minute. “What was that?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Her fists uncurl and her palms are flat against his chest. They travel steadily upward and it’s very difficult to worry about anything but that, and yet …

There’s another thump, followed by a muffled voice.

“Beckett.” He clears his throat, trying to tug his voice back down into manlier environs. “Really. What is that?”

“Camera guy,” she replies, all matter of fact. She loops her arms around his neck and erases the distance between them. “He’s in the bad closet.”

“The bad closet,” he repeats. The warmth of her mouth keeps approaching his skin, hovering, then pulling away. She’s teasing him, but this close, he can feel her heart thumping, too. He can feel the frustration of the past few days—the adrenaline of their near miss with Gates—boiling over. “So this …”—his arms slide around her waist—“This is the good closet?”

“Good.” He feels the brush of her nose as she nods just before her teeth close around his earlobe. “But not_ too_ good.”


	8. Risk Assessment—After Hours (5 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her dad is going out for breakfast with his mom. It’s going on four o’clock in the morning, and her dad’s first-ever all-nighter—if her mom’s stories about how buttoned up he’s always been are to be believed—starts with Martha Rodgers on his arm and a pointed look over his shoulder that says that she and Castle are not invited.

> _“I was afraid their friendship would end badly.”   
—Sister Mary, After Hours (5 x 08)_

* * *

****Her dad is going out for breakfast with his mom. It’s going on four o’clock in the morning, and her dad’s first-ever all-nighter—if her mom’s stories about how buttoned up he’s always been are to be believed—starts with Martha Rodgers on his arm and a pointed look over his shoulder that says that she and Castle are not invited.

“Is that …” She looks around wildly for Castle as the two of them disappear into the elevator. “Is that a good idea?”

“Well, my mother and sleep deprivation are involved,” he says. “So, no. There’s absolutely no chance that’s a good idea.”

“Should we go after them?” She takes zero steps in the direction of the elevator. Between that and the fact that it comes in the form of a question, she doesn’t seem particularly invested, but she can’t help blurting, “My dad can be kind of a jerk.”

Castle’s head swivels toward her. His _just-kidding_ expression evaporates before her eyes. “Kate. Your dad’s not a jerk.” His tone is guarded. “If you’re worried that my mother is”—he casts about for the right words—“going to be my mother, we can go after them.” 

“Your mother’s fine,” she says quickly.“I’m not worried about Martha. I’m not … “ She shakes her head. “I’m not worried about them.”

The implication falls silent and heavy between them: She’s not worried about their parents. She’s worried about _them._ Except that’s not true. She opens her mouth to tell him that it’s not true, but nothing comes out. As usual, it’s not _precisely_ true, but she doesn’t know how to say that.

“Well.” He claps his hands. It’s entirely too hearty. “If we’re not going to bust our parents for breaking curfew, then I guess we go home.”

_Home. _The simple word jolts the weary core of her. Home, tonight, means his place, and eight hours ago, that was without problems. She’d gotten ready there. She’d put on the pretty silk blouse she loves, but never has a chance to wear, and she’d spent an inordinate amount of time on hair designed to look effortless. She’d refreshed the slightly-more-than-overnight bag she carries back and forth between her place and his.

She’d fully intended to put her dad in a cab at the end of the evening, then wave to Eduardo as she made her way into the elevator that would take her back up tot the loft and the second glass of wine she knows Castle would have poured for her, because he would have noticed her not having it with dinner out of deference to her dad. She’d fully intended for his place to be home for the evening, but now …

“Kate?” The concern in his voice breaks her out of her reverie.

“Home,” she says belatedly. Absently. “Castle, can we just …” She looks around. “Can we sit for a second?” 

“Sure.” He looks around, too. There are chairs there, right by the elevator, but they’re both looking at them as though they just sprang, fully formed, from the crappy precinct tile. “Sit,” he says with a sweeping gesture he probably means to lighten the moment. “What’s up?”

She feels a twinge of annoyance at him for asking her point blank. It’s absurd and unfair and counterproductive and any number of things, especially after their ordeal. Especially after spending the last few hours thinking one or both of them wasn’t going to make it through alive. But there it is. One more damned moving part, but she blunders on.

“I kind of … I was kind of … dramatic in that cellar.” She looks at her hands twisting together between her knees. “About bubbles bursting, and—”

“Well, just so you know, I am anti-bursting.”

It’s somewhere between an interruption and picking up the conversation because she’s stalled out. It’s somewhere between joking to ease the tension and sweetly sincere, just like Leo the Bad Guy is somewhere between a manipulative murderer and the ghost of Mike Royce come to remind her not to squander what she has now on fear that she won’t have it a day, a week, a month from now. Just like four o’clock in the morning is somewhere between the end of a terrible night and the beginning of a day that doesn’t have to be terrible.

“Castle,” she says. She pleads, if she’s being honest. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Okay. Sorry.” There’s a twinge of annoyance in his voice, too. It makes her feel better, which is kind of messed up. But it makes her feel better. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

“The reason—one of the reasons—I was so afraid of this,” she gestures between them, “of us being together is because I didn’t want—I don’t want—to lose this person who’s been this important part of my life for four years.” She hangs her head. She’s saying this wrong. She’s saying all of it wrong. “I don’t want it all to end because of all these stupid little differences.” 

She stalls out. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t pick up the conversation. There’s silence and a gaping space between them on the stupid little chairs.

“Do you think—” he begins finally, then breaks off. “Do you think that’s any less true for me?” 

“No,” she says as though it’s not something she’s just realized. And it’s not really, but it’s something a still-fractured part of her conveniently forgets. “I know it’s not.” 

“I think—I _know _there’s a lot in this bubble.” He gives her a sideways smile that’s a little four-o’clock miserable. “And I think it’s pretty tough.”

“Tough bubble,” she says out loud. It’s funny in that four-o’clock-in-the-morning sort of way. “We’re in the tough bubble together.”

“We are.” He lets out an exhausted snort of laughter. “Can we be in it at home?”

“Home.” She stands and pulls him up with her. “Yeah. Let’s be in it at home.”


	9. Reclamation—Secret Santa (5 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He chases Alexis and his mother out more or less the minute dinner is over. Neither of them needs all that much chasing, though Alexis is definitely a bit annoyed with him. She’s red-cheeked and flustered as she steps away to call Max, but her bad poet leaps at the chance to have their skating date after all. He can hear the slightly tipsy cheer go up from his mother’s students when she calls to say she’ll be joining the caroling party, and an even bigger one go up when she says she’s still bringing the glögg, so he might be forgiven for being the villainous mastermind behind the on-again-off-again evening.

> _“We haven’t opened those boxes since.”  
—Kate Beckett, Secret Santa (5 x 09)_

* * *

****He chases Alexis and his mother out more or less the minute dinner is over. Neither of them needs all that much chasing, though Alexis is definitely a bit annoyed with him. She’s red-cheeked and flustered as she steps away to call Max, but her bad poet leaps at the chance to have their skating date after all. He can hear the slightly tipsy cheer go up from his mother’s students when she calls to say she’ll be joining the caroling party, and an even bigger one go up when she says she’s still bringing the glögg, so he might be forgiven for being the villainous mastermind behind the on-again-off-again evening. 

He wraps the two of them in scarves and coats. He pulls Alexis’s hat down over her eyes to make her laugh. He braces and tries not to hover as each of them, in turn, embraces Kate and quietly wishes her a Merry Christmas. He kisses them each on the cheek and shuts the door behind them.

There’s no sigh of relief from her as he turns the lock, but as she stands with her back to him, gazing a the tree, he sees her curl into herself a little. He looks around the loft and cringes at how big everything is. How overwhelming it must be for her, and he wants to offer to … he doesn’t know. Build a blanket fort or something so it won’t all be pressing in on her. He’s just about to to offer that or something equally absurd when she turns to him.

“Thank you, Castle.” She smiles. It’s a weary little thing, but it’s genuine and beautiful in the firelight and the glow of the tree. “Dinner was wonderful. Everything was wonderful.”

“Really?” He approaches her carefully. He wants to believe she’s sincere. “Not too much?”

“Oh, it’s _way_ too much,” she laughs. “It’s like a thousand times too much. But it wouldn’t be A Very Castle Christmas if it weren’t.”

“I suppose not,” he laughs along with her. He’s relieved—reassured at least, but he wonders. He still wonders. “But for you. Kate, if it’s too much for you—“

“No,” she shakes her head. She starts to say something. He thinks she starts to say one thing, but she says another. “It’s not too much for me. But …” She chews her lip a second, then rushes toward him. She presses a lingering kiss to his cheek, even as she’s pulling away. “Would you mind if I …” She darts toward his office. He sees that she has her phone in her hand. “There’s something I should do. Is that okay?”

“Of course.”

He shoos her into the office, pulling the door closed, even though it’s more or less a gesture, given the open shelves. He busies himself cleaning up the remains of their feast, ferrying dishes from the table to the kitchen and creating just enough racket to keep him honest, vis-à-vis the eavesdropping it takes every scrap of willpower to refrain from.

“Sorry,” she calls out quietly from the doorway not too long a while after. Her fingers are curled around the edge of the bookcase.“I stuck you with the cleaning.”

“No, my mother and daughter stuck me with the cleaning,” he says. He tosses a dishtowel over his shoulder and crosses the room to her.

“That was my dad,” she blurts before he even gets there. “I called my dad.”

He’s confused for a second. Dangerously confused as to why a simple call has her making what sounds like a confession, then it hits him: She called her dad for the first time in thirteen Christmases.

“How … was that?” he asks, even though he can see the answer for himself as he sweeps the hair back from her forehead. She’s still beautiful, but a damned sight wearier than she was a little while ago.

“New.” She reaches up to still his hand and tips her cheek into the curve of his palm. “He sounded glad. Really glad.” Her eyes close and her lips twitch in frustration. “I should have called sooner. Last year or the year before that or the year before …”

“But you called this year.” He slips his arm between the curve of her waist and the upright of the bookcase to draw her to him. “Are_ you _glad?” He pulls back a little to look into her eyes. “Did it make you glad to talk to him tonight?”

“It did.” She sounds a little surprised at her own answer. “It’s not like before.” A shadow passes over her face, a scowl because it’s obvious that it couldn’t possibly be like it was before her mother was taken from them both, but something more than that. “It wasn’t … I think I was dreading it. Dreading the idea of how sad he must be, and the idea that having to deal with how sad I am would just make it worse for him. But it was just …” She swallows back some tears. “It was nice.”

“Good,” he says. “Nice is good.”

He traces the smile that just touches the corner of her lips. He’d like to say more. He’d like to say too much, but he resists the urge. He just holds her until he feels her breath even out and her heart return to its slow, steady thump.

He keeps watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There’s likely to be a pause on these. I hope to be back.


	10. In Good Company—Significant Others (5 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This doesn’t feel like her. She’d like to say it isn’t her, slipping from the bed and tiptoeing around with every muscle tensed, because she’d really like to stomp. She’d really like to shove at the damnably sleeping bulk of him and start a fight, and it’s stupid. It’s completely childish, because she’s the one who insisted on coming back here. She’s the one who could have been surfing a champagne-and-strawberry wave, limbs heavy from more-than-a-little-angry jacuzzi sex.

> _“Okay, so it’s not just me.”  
—Richard Castle, Significant Others (5 x 10)_

* * *

****This doesn’t feel like her. She’d like to say it _isn’t_ her, slipping from the bed and tiptoeing around with every muscle tensed, because she’d really like to stomp. She’d really like to shove at the damnably sleeping bulk of him and start a fight, and it’s stupid. It’s completely childish, because she’s the one who insisted on coming back here. She’s the one who could have been surfing a champagne-and-strawberry wave, limbs heavy from more-than-a-little-angry jacuzzi sex.

But she had to make a point that she’s not even sure is hers. It’s Lanie’s. It’s the boys’. It’s the world’s, and now she’s slinking around in the warm, furry black of the loft because she can’t take another minute lying there with all these layers and layers of upset and performance and whatever weighing her down like a little girl playing dress-up.

She thinks about sulking in the bathroom. She has the absurd idea that she’ll climb into the empty tub in her pajamas and too-hot wooly socks because she doesn’t dare run an actual bath when every redhead in creation is asleep upstairs, and two out of three don’t deserve to suffer for his stupidity and hers. She thinks about the office, about turning on the TV and finding _To Catch a Thief_ on some channel, because _To Catch a Thief_ is always on some channel, and staring at the color-saturated images with the sound turned all the way down.

She thinks, briefly, about leaving. She thinks about melodramatic landings she might make on Lanie’s doorstep, on her dad’s, under a pseudonym in some hotel or other so that he’ll never find her. She grinds the heels of her hands into sandpaper eyelids and lets out a soft snort of laughter, because _whoa_—that’s sleep deprivation talking. It’s the time of year and the fact that she felt small and exposed and nervous even asking him if she could stay, and then she felt silly and buoyant and all butterflies when he said yes, because of course he said yes, and then Alexis got sick and Meredith showed up and this _really_ is not her. 

She decides, ultimately, on the kitchen—on filling the kettle as silently as she can and keeping close watch so she can catch it the very second before it splits the warm, furry black with its attention-demanding shriek. She decides on tea and rifling through the clutter inside of her until she can grab hold of one end, at least, of who she is, but she doesn’t make it that far. She slips past the closet through the alcove into the living room. She averts her gaze from the gravitational temptation of the front door.

She comes to a comically full and complete stop, mid-tiptoe, when she spies the gray-on-black, hunched shape on the far end of the couch.

“Alexis?”

“Detective Beckett?”

Her own practically voiceless whisper overlaps entirely with the raw-throated croak that’s all the young woman can manage. Kate runs through her escape scenarios in rapid succession all over again—_Lanie, her dad, hotel._ She eyes the front door and envisions herself flinging it open and running, wooly-socked and screaming, into the night.

“Are you okay?” she says instead as she makes her tentative way toward the couch. 

“Sick,” Alexis replies. It’s a little sharp, and Kate can see her wince in silhouette. “Hard to sleep with everything.”

“Everything.” It’s awkward, hovering like this in the dark. It’s painful to realize that she’s part of everything and she doesn’t know where to go in the long or short term. She sits on the edge of the couch for now, the very edge, as far from the girl’s feet as she can get. “I’m sorry. Is there anything …?”

She trails off as Alexis shakes her head as vigorously as she can, weighted down with sleep and sickness, with worry and everything. She trails off, and there seems to be nowhere for the conversation, the moment, the situation to go. She wonders if she should go straight back to bed or go through with the theater of tea. She wonders if she should offer to wake Castle—her dad—but she doesn’t even know what she’d call him if she did. It’s all unbearably awkward. 

“I’m the one …” Alexis swallows hard, painfully. “Sorry.” She shakes her head again. It seems like all she can manage, but she exerts herself anyway. “My mom. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for your mom being here.” The words come out louder than she intends. More forceful. “She’s your mom and you’re sick. Of course she should be here.”

The girl’s head snaps up at that. In the dark, Kate can hardly see her face, and still she knows the narrow-eyed _Come on_ expression on it. She’s seen it a hundred times on his face, and she feels her own cheeks burn at the things that have tumbled—are still tumbling—out of her mouth that don’t actually belong to her. _Of course_ she should be here, but the truth is, there’s no _of course _about it, and everyone involved knows that. Everyone knows and no one says and she has no idea how to navigate around that.

“Okay,” she says finally, and it sounds like a full stop. It sounds like a command to all the other voices that have crowded into her head. “Your mom _is_ here. And _you’re_ here and _I’m_ here, and it’s pretty crowded, isn’t it?” She smiles and light touches the crown of Alexis’s head as she nods. “Alexis, I can go—”

“No!” She sits abruptly straight up. It sends the blanket around her shoulders sliding to the floor. “Not good.” She makes a frustrated motion toward the stairs. “Everyone … gives in. Dad thinks”—she clears her throat as best she can—“Thinks it’s easier for me. Thinks it’s better.” She falls back against the mound of pillows again, worn out with too many words in a row. “Stay. Not good to give in.”

Kate’s head bows. Her chin falls against her chest as the thick, painstaking words make there way through layers and clutter and sleep deprivation and noise. They touch something that feels like her. It’s a little nasty and a lot frustrated, but it’s reasonable, too. It’s justified and it’s_ hard_ and it’s the right thing. 

“I’ll stay,” she says.

She reaches out a hand to help the girl—the young woman—up from the couch. She bends to retrieve the blanket from the floor and drapes it over her shoulders as she ushers her toward the stairs. She hesitates at the bottom. They both hesitate.

“You can tell me, okay?” Kate turns her by the shoulders to look her in the eyes. “If everything gets to be too much, you can tell me, and I can go, but for now, I’ll stay.”

Alexis nods. She flashes a wan smile and wraps one arm around Kate’s shoulders in an afterthought of a hug. Kate returns it a second too late. She gives her an awkward pat between the shoulder blades and the two of them laugh a little, because this isn’t easy either. This is part of everything and it’s hard and it’s new and neither one of them was expecting to have to navigate it.

Kate watches as Alexis climbs the stairs, shivering and weary. She watches until the cream of the blanket and the pale pink of her pajama bottoms disappear into the dark, then she turns and pads back into the bedroom. She strips off her wooly socks and shucks her pajama bottoms. She slips between the sheets and curls herself into the different warmth of his body.

She stays. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Another overly long one. I’ll try to be more concise with future sketches.


	11. Come About—Under the Influence (5 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It feels a little bit like they’re pulling in different directions lately. He wonders if it’s something he did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say. It tends to be that—one of those—or they pretend it is. By mutual agreement and longstanding tradition, they blame things on some boneheaded move of his, and it gets them in the neighborhood of whatever’s actually wrong.

> _“Oh, what? No smartass comeback now?”   
—Javier Esposito, Under the Influence (5 x 11)_

* * *

****It feels a little bit like they’re pulling in different directions lately. He wonders if it’s something he did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say. It tends to be that—one of those—or they pretend it is. By mutual agreement and longstanding tradition, they blame things on some boneheaded move of his, and it gets them in the neighborhood of whatever’s actually wrong.

But it doesn’t seem to be that kind of a thing.

They spend time together. His place, her place, his place, more and more and that seems to suit them both. They talk on the phone for far too long on the nights they don’t spend together, and they’re both downright adolescent about hanging up.

Day to day, she teases him and he teases back. She works, and he helps. Or if he can’t—if it’s paperwork or waiting for things—he gets in her hair. He fetches coffee and disappears when things get too boring, which is mostly code for when she _really_ has to work and there’s no time for the kind of idle conversation she pretends to be annoyed by, except when she doesn’t pretend. Except when she lets herself get pulled in to a nerd off or some ridiculous speculation on an unanswerable question.

It’s the kind of thing she’s doing less of lately. She’d_ been_ doing more of it and more of it and more of it over the last year before they were together, and even more still in the months since they have been together. And then there was less.

He doesn’t like it. It’s a change in the wrong direction—less of her, not more, and he wishes he knew why. He wishes it were as simple as something he did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say, but it doesn’t seem to be, so he soldiers on.

That’s all he’s doing when they’ve exhausted the humor inherent in Esposito on a commandeered bicycle, puffing fruitlessly after fourteen-year-old, ninety-eight-pound miscreant, and he moves on to the alluring subject of street names.

“It’s obvious what yours would be,” he says as he kicks back in the break room chair. He fixes her with a smug look. “Nobody’s Momma.”

He’s just trying to make her laugh. Esposito is all over their Fagin of Interest. Ryan is holding the fort down on the boring stuff. The two of them are practically superfluous right now, and he’d just like to draw the playfulness out of her, but he’s met with silence. He’s met with her chewing the corner of her lip, her thoughts turned utterly inward.

He deflates. He wonders again if it’s him, if it’s January, if there’s something he should be doing to our her back in his direction. He’s wondering still when suddenly she speaks.

“You didn’t just luck out,” she says, not playfully at all. There’s a flash of steel behind her eyes, and he doesn’t know who or what it’s for. “With Alexis. She’s a good kid, but that’s not just luck. You did a good job with her. A great job.”

“Thanks?” he says, question mark and all. He swallows past a lump in his throat that’s just materialized. “Kate, that’s … thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The words are sharp, as though she’s not done with the flash of steel. She’s not, it seems. “But I’m not just saying it to say it.” Her jaw works overtime. “It’s not an easy thing even with two people and you didn’t … there was just you.”

“Just me.” A joke bubbles up. A hundred jokes—self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing, self-sabotaging—but he resists. “It isn’t,” he repeats. He clarifies, still swallowing down the jokes he wants, almost instinctively, to make. “Easy, I mean.”

“Tell me about it.” She folds her hands on the break room table. It’s a request. A demand, maybe.

“About … parenting?” He looks to her. She nods. Definitely a demand. “Before or after Meredith _actually _left?”

He leans into the question with his own flash of steel. With vehemence he hasn’t allowed himself in a while.

“Both,” she says. “And during.”

She sounds a little frustrated. A little impatient and he sees suddenly that she knows, too. He sees suddenly that this is her tugging him in her direction, and willingly he goes. He takes a breath and begins.

“It was hard from the start,” he says. “It got easier—a little easier—when she was gone for good.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I’m breaking my own “rule” a little here, as Caskett are in the background of this episode (because, of course, they were making good use of the Little Scarf that Could [See my story Going Under for this]), so Meredith’s parting shot from “Significant Others” intrudes into this drabble!fail.


	12. Cadence—Death Gone Crazy (5 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her phone rings just as she’s shouldering her way through her apartment door. It’s him, of course. He’d left the precinct an hour or so ahead of her, and now he’s calling, as usual, with timing so impeccable she wonders sometimes if he’s surveilling her.

> > _“When your boss gives you a directive, you follow it.”  
—Scarlett Jones, Death Gone Crazy (5 x 12)_

* * *

****Her phone rings just as she’s shouldering her way through her apartment door. It’s him, of course. He’d left the precinct an hour or so ahead of her, and now he’s calling, as usual, with timing so impeccable she wonders sometimes if he’s surveilling her.

_“You ever do it in a nightclub, Detective?”_ His over-the-top seductive voice preempts whatever hello she might have had planned. It gets to her, ridiculous as it is, and she wishes she’d followed the instinct to head to the loft, rather than here. _“Hot, sweaty, quick?” _

“What’s it to you, Castle?” She sets down her bag and keys and shrugs out of her coat. She’s smiling hard enough that she knows he can hear it down the line. “Did you ‘find’ one of my bras again?”

_“One,” _he says, dropping out of his gravel-voiced hunk persona, _“I want to know everything about you. That’s what it is to me. And two, at least three of your bras are here, hand washed and drip dried after you cleverly hid them in between the mattress and the wall, among the fencing foils in the office, and—oh, yes—there was the one that ended up draped over a ceiling fixture.” _

“I did _not _leave a bra draped over a ceiling fixture.” She flops down on to the couch and buries a breathless laugh in a throw pillow. She might have left a bra draped over a ceiling fixture.

_“Reeeeeaaaally?”_ He drags out the word. He knows there’s no_ might have _about it, and he knows she knows. _“Must be my mother’s. Or perhaps it belongs to Alexis. I’ll have to survey the household.” _

“Don’t you dare!” she warns him. She tries to warn him, but the laugh might undermine things. The fact that she’s blushing furiously and he damn well knows that, too, might take the menace right out of it. She buries her face in the pillow again. “Are there really three of them there?”

_“Um …” _She hears him moving around. She decodes his footsteps—tile, rug, bare floor, rug again—and knows he’s crossing the living room and stepping into the bedroom to peer into the fancy basket that appeared by the bed one day, the one that he only ever puts her things in. _“Can confirm three. Shall I count the panoply of tiny panties?” _

“I guess you have to entertain yourself somehow,” she shoots back.

_“I do,” _he agrees._ “Especially since my club sex days are behind me.” _

Her breath catches just south of her collar bones at the way he says it. He’s grumbling. He’s playing it up, but underneath he sounds delighted by the prospect.

There’s a picture of him in her mind, a collage of real-life images. He’s sitting on the couch surrounded by laundry—his, hers, his mother’s, his daughter’s, all jumbled together until he sorts it out. He looks up as she trudges through the door, late, late, late on a Friday, a Saturday. He smiles, and there’s an unspoken _Hi, honey, I’m home_ between them. 

She’s delighted by it, too. She’s smiling hard into the pillow, and pressing her hands against the fluttering content under her ribs at the domesticity of it all. She’s rising up from the couch.

“Are they now?” she says, sliding a wicked, arched eyebrow down the line.

_“Y—Yes? No?”_ he stammers. _“Not … not if you want to have club sex.” _

“I do.” She makes her way swiftly to the bedroom. She yanks open her lingerie drawer to survey the options. “Hot, sweaty. Not too quick, though.”

_“Not too quick. Definitely not,” _he says, sounding as though that might be a tall order at the moment. _“Do you—do you have a club in mind?” _

“Oh, yes.” She shimmies out of her work clothes. “It’s very exclusive. Very trendy.”

_“Trendy how?” _

“They offer fluff and fold service,” she says. She gives her reflection an over-the-top sexy pout. “If you catch my drift.”

There’s a pause. A grin so wide it’s audible. There’s sudden movement.

_“Oh, I do, Detective.” _His voice bounces off the bathroom tile. _“See you there?”_

“Twenty minutes.” She ends the call.

It’s less than twenty. He jerks open the door before she has a chance to buzz. He tugs her through the hallway, the alcove, the bedroom. He wrestles her bag from her shoulder and her coat from her body. He tosses them to fall where they may and tugs her into the bathroom.

There’s a thumping techno beat coming from who knows where. There’s low, throbbing light. The fog from the full-blast steam shower is thick enough they can barely see each other. He pins her against a slick tile wall.

It’s hot and sweaty and not at all quick. 


	13. Ekphrasis—Recoil (5 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It doesn’t last. Her bravado, conviction, zen-like acceptance that getting Bracken—getting justice for her mother and Montgomery and all the other victims, known and unknown—will have to come some other day. It starts to come apart at the seams almost as soon as he makes the executive decision to switch off the TV entirely when it becomes clear that there’s almost literally nothing on other than Bracken’s smug face.

> _“Someone obviously went to great lengths to make sure she disappeared.”   
—Kate Beckett, Recoil (5 x 13) _

* * *

****It doesn’t last. Her bravado, conviction, zen-like acceptance that getting Bracken—getting justice for her mother and Montgomery and all the other victims, known and unknown—will have to come some other day. It starts to come apart at the seams almost as soon as he makes the executive decision to switch off the TV entirely when it becomes clear that there’s almost literally nothing on other than Bracken’s smug face.

She tenses against his body. He’s crowded in behind her—he has her framed in his arms—and he feels her vertebrae go _snick,_ one by one, until they are an unrelenting, upright column. He feels her lungs pull in breath to protest, and he dives into the last instant of silence before she can.

“Tell me a story,” he says, low in her ear. He keeps close, when usually he’d retreat. Usually, he’d give her space, but he doesn’t this time. He’s not sure what’s possessed him.

“A story?” The odd request shocks some of the resistance out of her. She is a line dissolving into a series of curves. Her chin swivels to look at him over her shoulder. Her ribs, her collar bones, dip to accommodate it. Her posture opens enough to let his palm slip over the crest of her hip and across the expanse of her body. “_Me_ tell _you_ a story?”

“Yes, please.” He’s all prim and proper about it. He settles back against the couch’s right-angle bend. He shifts his shoulders in an exaggerated settling-in gesture as he draws her back with him.

“What—?” She frowns at what seems to be a question in place of what they were honestly both expecting to be a flat-out refusal. “A story about what?”

“Anything,” he says, but thinks better of it. _Anything_ is too vast a territory. She can rules-lawyer her way out of _anything._ “A true story. Leave the fiction to me.”

He feels the resistance building in her again. He sees it in the busy-fingered way she plucks at the seam along the top of the couch and the restless shift of her lower body—knees up, feet flat, legs stretched out, toes reaching. He follows the rolling waves of her sadness and his gaze lands on something—an idea, an object, a character. 

“Her,” he says. He lifts her hand and uses it to point to the figure on the table at the far end of the couch. “Tell me a true story about her.”

There’s an instant of silence, taut as a drum skin. Her ribs rise beneath the arm looped around her waist. Her elbow straightens, and he thinks at first that she’s pulling away—that he’s gotten things terribly wrong—but she laughs. Her head drops back against his shoulder, hard enough that they both wince. She circles her wrist to grab hold of _his _hand. To point at the small statue with both their fingers in tandem.

“Her,” she says, a little like a just-broken suspect, but the tail of end of that laugh is still wrapped around them, so it’s okay. She brings his hand to rest on her other hip, effectively folding herself in his embrace. “You _would _want to know about her.”

“Now I definitely would.” He buzzes the words against the soft of her neck. He studies the_ her _in question, filing away a detailed report in his own memory. She’s a foot tall, or maybe a little less. She’s carved of some pale material that he knows already will be smooth and cool to the touch. She’s a fascinating mixture of featureless and expressive, with her head tipped to the right and her arms akimbo. There’s a slight bend in one knee as if she’s about to stride fearlessly into the next moment and the next. “Tell me about her.”

It takes her a little while to gather herself. With their heads bent together, he can almost feel the gears of her mind whirring in their orderly, methodical way. She won’t dive headlong into the story like he would, and the anticipation is delicious.

“Burke has one. My therapist,” she clarifies, even though he knows. She’s told him—haltingly—a little the man. A little about her sessions. “The same artist, but she’s sitting in his. This beautiful, elegant pose. It’s on the table by the patient“—her jaw clenches as she corrects herself—“the _client _chair.”

“And you liked her?” It’s a pointed question. Prodding like a herding dog nosing all his people into the same room. He’s still not sure what’s possessed him, but it feels like the wrong thing to let her duck into herself right now. “You liked her, so you got yourself one.”

“I _hate _her.” Her fingers curl and her nails dig into the backs of his hands for a fraction of a second, then release. She laughs again. It’s not hearty this time. It’s thick-throated, tiptoeing the line right up to tears. “I hated her.” The past tense siphons off some of the tension. “Every week I was two seconds from throwing her through the window.” She stretches her leg out. She points emphatically with her big toe. “_That’s_ why I got her.”

“But it’s not why you _have_ her, is it?” It’s not a question, it’s a prompt. It’s another cold, wet nose to the back of a bare thigh.

“No,” she admits. She draws her foot in. She tucks one leg under her body and pulls the other in toward her body. She lifts their arms together and loops them—all four—around her knee. “I have her because she’s strong.”

“And brave,” he adds. He spreads his fingers wide. He presses his palms to the lithe muscle of her thigh and feels the thrum of connection between them. “And good.”

“Good,” she echoes. “I hope so.” She takes one smooth, deep breath, then another, then another, then another. “She tries. She tries her best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Another little bit of a cheat, as this is mostly responding to an object. As much as Inner Stage Manager hates Beckett’s apartment, we love many of the objects in it. I am not sure when this figure appeared. It doesn’t seem to be there in early days, and of course I don’t know that it’s by the same artist who did the piece that’s in Burke’s office, but the similarities struck me.


	14. Afoot—Reality Star Struck (5 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something annoying is going on. She’s only vaguely aware of it. That’s part of what’s annoying about … whatever it is. Her spine is like pudding. Her limbs are heavy and she’s the good kind of sore in all the best places. She shouldn’t be aware of anything—not even vaguely aware.

> _“It looks like one of us did their homework.”  
—Richard Castle, Reality Star Struck (5 x 13)_

* * *

****Something annoying is going on. She’s only vaguely aware of it. That’s part of what’s annoying about … whatever it is. Her spine is like pudding. Her limbs are heavy and she’s the good kind of sore in all the best places. She shouldn’t be aware of anything—not even vaguely aware.

“Castle,” she mutters in a voice so low, only the pillow can hear it. “Don’t be … whatever you are being. Doing. Don’t.”

There’s no answer. Like—_no _answer at all. That draws her closer to the threshold of the waking world. It touches the surface of annoyance and sends a ripple of slow-motion alarm ever outward.

“Castle!” She pushes up on her elbows. She slaps at his side of the bed and finds cool sheets and blankets pulled, taut and neat, up over his pillow.

She blinks in the dark. She swipes at her eyes and shakes her head as though she can shed her groggy state that way. She gropes for her phone as alarm builds up speed and chases annoyance to the ends of the earth.

“Where the hell are you,” she says out loud, and then he’s there beside her. His weight dips the mattress. She’s unsteady on one elbow. The motion topples her. It sends her sliding toward him.

“Here,” he whispers as he carefully stops her progress toward the edge of the bed. “Sorry. I’m here.”

He smells wrong. He feels wrong. She’s grumpy about it. She’s _annoyed._ “You smell like cold.”

“Cold has a smell?” he asks. He pulls his hands back from where they’re hovering just shy of her body, though. He half rises to liberate the covers from beneath the butt cheek he’s perched on and tuck them around her.

“It has a _smell,”_ she insists. “And you have clothes.” She frowns over that. It’s stating the obvious, so she adds, “Clothes on. And it’s the middle of the night.” Her head is too heavy. She lets it sink back into the pillow. “Why do you have cold clothes on?”

“Had to run out.” He sets to work on solving the problem of clothes. He makes short work of his shirt buttons and his watch. “Thought I’d be back before you woke up.” He’s sliding open the drawer—his drawer—and she can just make out the glint of his apologetic smile in the light that slips between the slats of the window blinds from the street. “Sorry.”

She tucks her chin down at a sharp angle so she can watch him tug at buckles and zippers and socks that don’t want to come off. The whole process looks complicated. It makes her tired. It makes her want him back in bed and not cold.

“Where?” She shifts her head a little more so the pillow swallows up a smaller percentage of her words. “Where’d you run?”

“Surprise,” he says as he steps out of his jeans and slides his boxes downward.

“Surprise!” she repeats, laughing at the way it coincides with nudity at last. She’s punch drunk with sleep interrupted, but then she remembers that she’s annoyed. She follows his journey around the foot of the bed to his side with narrowed eyes. “Surprise for me this time?”

“Definitely for you.” He sounds sheepish as he slips beneath the covers. He _looks _a little sheepish when the two of them come nose to nose in the center of the bed. “Only for you this time.”

“Where is it?” She reaches out to tweak his ear and yelps at how cold it is. “My surprise?”

“I thought it would be be for morning.” He reaches for her, then remembers that every inch of his skin is apparently freezing cold. He thinks a second, then wraps a fold of blanket around his fingers before he reaches up to stroke her shoulder. “Breakfast surprise.”

“It won’t even be Valentine’s then,” she grumbles.

“It’s already not Valentine’s,” he says gently. “It’s late.”

“It’s late.” She yawns and wriggles her shoulders. She presses into his blanket-draped touch. She lets out a snort of laughter, thinking what a ridiculous image it must be. A Scooby-Doo ghost in the bed. It really is late, and she’s drifting. She’s sinking back into sleep, but there’s something serious in the air. “What is it?”

She’s asking about the surprise, but she’s not. She’s asking why he ran out and back in the cold. Why he’s so serious. _Why, why why … _

“Why, why, why?” she hears him say, so she must have said it out loud. “Why, why, why,” he says again. His voice is hypnotic. She feels his thumb, just a little chilly now, stroking her temple. “Why don’t you go back to sleep, Kate?”

“I wanna know.” It’s true. She can hardly keep her eyes open, but she wants to know.

“Okay,” he sighs. He throws back the covers. There’s a high-pitched noise that absolutely must be him as the cold air hits. “Be right back.”

She shoves her arm under her pillow to prop her head up. She watches out of one eye as his naked silhouette retreats, then advances, then slips back into the bed. Her stomach rumbles immediately at the scent wafting up and out of whatever he’s brought with him. A bag, she sees. She hears the rustle of it and knows before he hands it over that it will be warm and a little greasy.

“Potato chips?” She bolts upright and tips the open mouth of the bag toward the light.

“Surprise!” He flashes her a weak smile she can hardly see in the dark.

“Why middle-of-the-night potato chips?” Half the question gets swallowed up as she pops one in her mouth. It’s the perfect thickness, saltiness, crispness. It’s the perfect everything. She makes an undignified noise of pleasure. 

“Sorry gift.” He shrugs. He’s blushing in the dark. He must be blushing. “Catch-up gift.”

“Ketchup?” She makes a face. Her hand darts into the bag. Another chip makes its way into her mouth with lightning speed. “Ketchup is _not _a gift.”

“Catch. Up.” He exaggerates the words. “I have to catch up. You won. Big time.”

“I won,” she repeats smugly, as though it’s obvious, but her forehead crinkles. She crunches meditatively on another chip. “I won what?”

“Valentine’s.” He pulls one of the pillows from beneath his head and hugs it to his chest. His gaze skitters away. “I screwed up.”

“No.” She stops with her hand in the bag. She remembers the icy chill like a hundred little footsteps down her spine when Gates called him into the office. “Okay. A little. But no.”

“I did,” he says into the fluffy recesses of the pillow. “I went all … me.”

“I like all you.” She makes a dive for him. She goes to swipe the pillow out of the way, then realizes the bag of chips is still in her hands and she’s not at all willing to surrender it. “_All _you.”

She scowls, still too sleepy to sort out the problem of hands and chips and pillows and greasy bags. He’s on the job, though. He props his pillow and hers and a bridge pillow between them half up against the headboard. He helps lift the bag clear of the covers.

“Good.” He say it heartily enough, but it doesn’t sound like he believes her. He slides an arm behind her and settles her, half sitting up, against his chest. “That’s good.”

“I do,” she says crossly. “Don’t be dumb just because I won.”

“Trying.” He laughs in her ear. “But I wish …” He trails off, but she elbows him in the ribs. A warning to let him know he won’t get away with that. “I didn’t think to go small. Small is perfect.”

“Chips are small.” She finds a delectably tiny chip—proof positive—and lets it melt on her tongue. Something about it triggers a memory. She lifts the bag and peers at it closely. “Emmett’s. These are from … you went to SoHo for potato chips in the middle of the night?”

“You didn’t eat just one.” His tone is somewhere between self-conscious and smug.

“I ate them all,” she remembers. It had to be two years ago. Three, maybe. It had been well after midnight and he’d suddenly told her to stop the car a few blocks from his loft—so suddenly that she’d actually listened for once. He’d leapt out as she was still coasting to the curb. The place was closing—was closed, really—but he’d rapped on the window and sweet talked someone until he emerged victorious with a bag just like this one. She scowls at him. “You said I ate them all.”

“All minus one.” He cranes his neck to plant an awkward kiss at the outermost edge of her scowl. “You _did_ let me have one.”

“Can’t have just one of these.” She demonstrates with one, two, three, in rapid succession. “That’s ridiculous.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There is NO excuse for the length of this dumb thing. Sorry.


	15. Virulent—Target (5 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t want to leave the precinct for all the wrong reasons.

> _“I am sick in my heart.”  
—Anwar El-Masri, Target (5 x 15) _

* * *

****He doesn’t want to leave the precinct for all the wrong reasons.   


It’s not hubris. In the moments when his exhausted mind can latch on to anything but this all-consuming grief, he is mortified by every time over the last four years that he’s played the smartest kid in the room. The fact that he doesn’t want to leave is no kind of fantasy that there’s something he alone will see or do or produce that can save his daughter. He knows there is nothing he can contribute. He is a distraction—angry and defensive. A liability by everyone’s lights. By Harris’s and by hers.

And still, he doesn’t want to leave.

It’s not comfort he’s seeking, either. There is no comfort for him. Not in her wrapping her arms around him or taking his hand or trying to spare him as much of the horror as possible. There is no comfort in having her by his side as he waits, and no comfort in this kindness she has tried to do for him just now. Low, soothing words, the warmth of the most intimate, long-standing gesture between them, and the promise of tireless, unceasing work.

Comfort cannot keep him there, and still he doesn’t want to leave.

He cannot face going home. He cannot face a space overrun with strangers and activity and effort that will still be so harrowingly empty of everything. He cannot face his mother. She will need him, and he will need her, and he cannot face it. He doesn’t know how to be a son right now or how to meet the impossible demands of being human.

_That’s_ why he doesn’t want to leave.

He is not human. Staring at the white lid of a coffee cup in his hand, he has this out-of-body realization that he simply is not. Images of Roger Henson’s mutilated hands run through his mind to the soundtrack of Douglas Stevens’ screams. The scent of blood rolling from the abandoned van fills his mouth and his nose and the obscene wish he made then sounds in his ears all over again: Let it be Sara. Don’t let it be Alexis.

He is a monster and there is nowhere he can go.

“Kate,” he calls out just when he thinks he will go to the ground, howling and snapping and laying waste to everything within reach. “Kate.”

She is at his side before her name fades a second time. Her hands are wrapped around his, the two of them holding on to the coffee cup like the sacred thing it might be right now.

“I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying. He closes his eyes tight and tries to hold on to the slender thread of himself. “I know I’m supposed to go, but I had to tell you I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t ask for what. She doesn’t tell him there is nothing on earth he has to be sorry for right now. She doesn’t meet him with platitudes or empty assurances. She holds on to him. She faces what he is right now without fear or judgment or pain of her own. She stands with him until this particular wave breaks.

She loosens her fingers, then, and walks them up to his elbows, his shoulders, either side of his bowed head. She speaks low, her voice filled with sorrow and strength.

“You don’t have to handle me, Castle,” she says, gentle to the ends of the earth. “You don’t have to be … anything you can’t be right now.”   
He wants to interject, protest, confess, but she quiets him with a look. With strong, cool fingers that sweep the hair back from his forehead.

“You really don’t have to,” she tells him with such conviction that he believes it in some minuscule fraction of his broken heart. “I am here, no matter what. I can take it.”


	16. Pro Tempore—Hunt (5 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’d known him for less than a day the first time he’d managed to draw her into a an excessively nerdy, abjectly stupid conversation about the best superpower. She’d known him for less than an day before she understood the full scope of how wrong he could be.

> _“Look, we’re exposed here.”_  
_—Jackson Hunt, Hunt (5 x 16)_

* * *

She’d known him for less than a day the first time he’d managed to draw her into a an excessively nerdy, abjectly stupid conversation about the best superpower. She’d known him for less than a day before she understood the full scope of how wrong he could be.

_Flight is lame, Detective,_ he’d said, swiveling a circle in an office chair that was by no stretch of imagination his._ Teleportation is flight plus instantaneous groceries where they need to go._

She has fought him, tooth and claw, for four years on the issue. Flight is only one option she’s argued for. She’s made the case for everything from telepathy to pyrokinesis—and with him in the mix, the ability to set something or someone on fire with her mind comes up a lot— but he has held fast on teleportation, and suddenly she gets it. Suddenly, on top of Every. Last. Single. Thing, she gets the appeal of teleportation, because she wants them home yesterday. Not Paris-to -New-York, congratulations-on-the-six-hours-you-have-clawed-back-from-the-universe yesterday, but literally yesterday. The day before yesterday.

She wants him never to have gone without her. She wants him never to have left her here, helpless and ill-equipped for the things she has absolutely needed to do in the last forty-eight hours. Because she would kick over a thousand hundred million chairs with a thousand hundred million unsuspecting Pauline Degarmos in them.

She would come close—so close—to spitting in the faces of as many Agent Harrises as the Bureau has in the Area 51 cold storage unit where they obviously keep Agent Harrises. She would torture—or honestly be tortured by—literally any number of Roger Hensons or Roger Henson–annihilators if it meant not being called upon to sit quietly with Martha for the space of an entire day, wondering what this has all been about, what happened in Paris, if they really are miraculously safe and on their way home, or if this is her broken mind going on walk-about because the alternative is unthinkable.

But she is called upon to do that. Not so much sit quietly in the literal sense—not with Martha—but to wait, to fill such a vast swath of time doing nothing more than setting the loft to rights. She answers the call as best she can. She retrieves clips and cables and coffee cups the FBI left scattered as they cleared out. She straightens chairs and tchotchkes and changes the sheets on the bed and the towels in the master bath. She meekly follows instructions and leaps at the chance to go out and picks up groceries, then feels guilty when she comes back to find Martha perched on the edge of the couch, looking fragile and lost.

She urges Martha up. She tells her they have to hang the banner, that they have a hundred things to do. She tries for brightness, then for the dark, brittle humor that, it turns out, suits them both better as they resort to busy work, readying the kitchen and waiting for it to be a reasonable hour to actually start preparing the breakfast Martha is fixated on greeting them with.

She keeps the street-facing windows out of the corner of her eye as the two of them dance around one another in the kitchen, talking quietly—occasionally—about anything but what has happened. Talking about nothing at all. She tries not to check again and again and again to see if the sky is finally growing light—if the miserable winter sun is showing itself at last.

And then, the way it happens sometimes, the wait is over. The key is in the lock and the door is swinging open. Alexis launches herself into Martha’s arms, and he stops short on the threshold, looking contrite, defiant, sad, weary, joyous and too many other things for her to grasp in a single glance, or even in the endless stolen glances around the breakfast table as he crafts a kind of truth about what happened on the fly.

She tries to take her leave when Alexis’s eyes begin to droop, when Martha truly begins to fade. He announces that he needs to put both his girls to bed straight away, and she tries to quietly gather her things, but his hand falls on her shoulder.

“Stay?” he says in a low voice. “Can you please … just for little?”

She nods. She kisses Martha’s cheek and presses a protective palm against the back of Alexis’s head as the girl embraces her and murmurs something confused and grateful, something undeserved as far as Kate is concerned. She really did so little.

She waits again. She moves dishes from the table to the sink, even though he told her to leave them be. He tells her again, silently this time. He arrives soundlessly behind her and takes the stack of bowls from her hands. He sets them on the counter and wraps his arms around her waist. He rests his chin in the crook of her neck.

“You were right,” she says, pressing her cheek to his. “Teleportation is obviously the best superpower.”

“No,” he says. He laughs softly into her hair. “Time travel. If I had time travel, you would never know I was stupid enough to go without you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the lackluster entry. Feeling pretty sick today.


	17. Aspiration—Scared to Death (5 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He loves to watch her sleep.

> _“What she thought was going to happen versus what actually happened are two completely different things.”  
—Kate Beckett, Scared to Death (5 x 17)_
> 
> * * *

****He loves to watch her sleep.

It’s cliché. It’s creepy, or so she tells him when she’s catches him in the act. (She catches him in the act a lot.) It’s silly, but he really does love it, especially on nights like this. The little trick with ice, long anticipated, has been revealed. She has demonstrated her mastery of the Art of Ice to his exquisite pleasure-pain-pleasure satisfaction. She’s left the whole bedroom in disarray to say the least, and he loves the contrast of the trail of destruction that force of chaos has left in its wake with the sweet flutter of her breath and the innocent twitch of her nose as she dreams dreams he’d love to know more about. He’d love to know _everything _about them.

She may think it’s creepy that he loves to watch her sleep, but she likes to have him there while she does. Whether or not she’d ever admit it, there’s ample evidence that she likes it. Sometimes that takes the form of a heavy palm splayed out over his shoulder blade, his chest. Sometimes it’s something close to a strangle hold on him as she asserts her right to be the big spoon. And sometimes she flings her limbs out wide on her side of the bed, and there’s no contact between them, but the minute he moves—the minute the distribution of his weight and hers over the mattress changes in the slightest—she grumbles loose-voweled accusations about stealing covers, snoring, riding ponies in the kitchen.

It’s one of those nights tonight. She’s on her back with her hands clasped on the pillow above her head. The blankets, sheets, everything, are twined around her, leaving one leg entirely bare. For his part, he’s not quite awake, but not quite asleep, either. His eyelids rise and fall at long intervals as he lies on his side within palm-splaying, little-spoon distance, watching the smooth waves of her breath, in and out, in and out.

His thoughts drift with it, a not-quite-guided meditation. He thinks about her smile behind a whisky glass, her voice from the bedroom like a sharp, seductive tug on the reins. He thinks about her belly laugh, her little girl giggle _in medias res_ at the way he gasped _Oh, my—Oh, MY_ because the icy chill of her tongue, her fingertips, her breath had stolen virtually every word in his considerable vocabulary. He thinks about soft paper creases in her elegant fingers and shy pink roses in her cheeks as her eye fell on his emphatic handwriting. _Be with Kate. _

_When did you write this? _she’d wondered aloud, and now, as he bobs on the surface of sleep, poetry slides easily into the spaces between breaths. _Forever ago, _he wishes he’d said. _The moment we met. Before I knew there was a you. Before I knew there was a me._ The music of it coaxes him toward waking, toward action. _Ooh, I can cross that one off._ It makes his fingers twitch, buried deep beneath his own pillow, and still the movement makes her stir.

_No, _she mutters. She frowns and presses her shoulders into the bed. She yanks the covers sharply in her direction, leaving so much of him bare. _Not just that._

She’s dreaming. She’s fighting with someone in her sleep. Herself, him, them, but the words are another sharp tug on the reins. He’s fully awake. He’s fully aware of her—of himself—with the profundity dear to the the middle of the night.

_Be with Kate. _

It’s not just this. Bare skin and her breath. Soreness settling into recently unearthed parts of his body, and long, restful nights watching her sleep. This—right now—is an astonishing thing to have. This is more than he knew to hope for, but he won’t cross that one off. Not yet. 

He dares to rise up next to her. He anticipates the wild flailing of her limbs and gathers her into his body._ Little spoon, _he calls her. Her scowl is epic, but sleep has too tight a hold on her for it to really be dangerous. He gentles her back beneath the surface of it with a string of kisses and nonsense words. He splays his fingers wide, rib to rib to rib, and gives her back the sweet, lulling sensation of her own breath.

_Be with Kate,_ he murmurs as sleep comes for him, too. _Not just that. _


	18. Agonist—The Wild Rover (5 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jenny is crying in the break room. Esposito’s words come low and fast in her ear, and she leads him away by instinct, because—God—Jenny is crying in the break room, and they cannot, under any circumstances, let her catch wind of any of this mess.

> _“Why would he do a thing like this?”  
—Jenny Duffy O’Malley Ryan, The Wild Rover (5 x 18)_
> 
> * * *

****Jenny is crying in the break room. Esposito’s words come low and fast in her ear, and she leads him away by instinct, because_—God—_Jenny is crying in the break room, and they cannot, under any circumstances, let her catch wind of any of this mess.

“How long?” she snaps, and Esposito thrusts the phone in her face to show the seconds the call’s been connected unfolding. Too many for them to know so little, and the alternative is worse. She’s vaguely aware of Castle hovering, twisting in place as he’s torn between looking uselessly over her shoulder at the phone and back at Jenny. Crying. “And we don’t know—”

Esposito snaps his fingers at her. Right in her face, and she’d break them off and shove them down his throat at any other moment in the history of the universe, but there’s conversation at last. Ryan’s voice. Thank _God,_ it’s Ryan’s voice. The three of them move as one further still from the break room. It’s fucking monstrous, but they absolutely cannot risk Jenny hearing it.

“LT has her,” Castle says, in as low a voice as possible. His fingers curl over her shoulder and squeeze far too hard.

She gives a sharp nod and feels one tiny knot loosen in her gut as she turns her attention back to the phone. There’s the grudging rumble of another voice—Finch, she thinks, attaching the face from the board to it—and then Ryan’s, distant and alien sounding. Rambling about it being late. Rambling about fishing.

“Docks.” Esposito points to the map up on the board.

It’s marked with Bobby S’s house and red arrows indicating suspected body dumps he’s connected with, and they’re rolling. They’re pushing through the door to the stairs, because none of them can possibly wait for the elevator. She casts a last look over her shoulder. 

Jenny is crying in the break room.

She’s white-knuckling the wheel, more or less drafting behind Esposito’s car as he takes lights and corners and lane changes like a man possessed. 

“Do you think they’ll name it after me?” Castle asks suddenly. The words are broken up by the bounce of his shoulder against the door as she cranks a turn.

“What?” The word comes tearing out of her. She can’t spare a glare. “Castle, what the hell are you—”

“The baby,” he says, calmly grabbing for the _oh shit _bar above his window. “Kevin and Jenny. I mean, I know Kevin has, like, a million sisters—”

Esposito makes a sudden move around some tool who’s circling for parking. She punches her accelerator to follow, then has to tap the break to avoid running up his bumper. The abrupt rocking-horse motion forces another interruption. Not that you’d know it from the way he goes on.

“—and Jenny’s got that whole blended family mess, but come on. I’m the cool uncle.” He switches his hold from the _oh shit_ bar to the arm rest as she follows Esposito’s lead, zig-zagging in and out of lanes. “It’s just too bad there’s no feminine version of Richard,” he muses as he watches the city scenery on fast forward. “Castle’s unisex, though. That wouldn’t be too weird. Would that be too weird?”

Esposito cuts his siren and lights. She follows suit. They’re close. She can see a blessed white line of radio cars from the hundred and twentieth in the distance. She ignores Castle’s bizarre, stream-of-consciousness ramblings to focus on the road.

“We’ll spoil them rotten,” In her peripheral vision, she sees him wagging a finger in her general direction. “And yes, Beckett, I said we. There’s no point in pretending you’re not going to be the soft touch Auntie.”

She brings the car to a stop, finally_—finally._ Esposito is already pouring out on to the street, going for the gear in his trunk, even as the ranking Staten Island personnel crowd around him.

“What are you—Castle, what are you talking about?” she roars. She slams her palms against the wheel. “What are you _doing?”_

“Making my case to be Baby Ryan’s namesake,” he says, absolutely unruffled by the fact that she’s screaming in face. “You made Jenny cry, so you’re already behind.”

“I didn’t—” Her voice stops, absolutely. She’s choking. She’s _choking_ on the image of Jenny’s tearstained face, and then she’s past it. Rage, anger, nerves, sorrow, fear wash out of her in a rush, and she understands. She gets what he’s doing.

“Do you know what might put you back in the game though?” He leans in, conspiratorial. His fingers curl over her shoulder and squeeze too hard. “Bringing Kevin home safe.”

“Bring him home,” she echoes. She finds her breath, her focus, her will. “We should probably go do that, then.”


	19. Sparkling—The Lives of Others (5 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d never dream of telling her she’s tipsy. He’d probably have to be safely in a different borough from her—at minimum a different borough—before he’d take his life into his hands by using theT word in reference to her. Even then, he’d be looking over his shoulder,

> _“Did you ever stop to think that maybe there’s an innocent explanation for everything?”   
—Alexis Castle, The Lives of Others (5 x 19)_

* * *

****He’d never dream of telling her she’s tipsy. He’d probably have to be safely in a different borough from her—at minimum a different borough—before he’d take his life into his hands by using the_T_ word in reference to her. Even then, he’d be looking over his shoulder, terrified that she’d somehow know.

(She would definitely—somehow—know.)

(But she might be a little tipsy.)

The thing is, he’s seen her drunk. Not a lot. She’s too careful and too cognizant of her father’s day-by-day battle for it to happen often. But there have been hard cases where the four of them, the five or six of them, the two of them let the middle of the night creep up on them, and she get stony. She gets bleak.

And then there have been innocent occasions, celebrations and bull sessions where they lose track of how many hours and how many rounds have passed—the four, the five or six, the two of them—and she gets sharply funny. The depth of her education and the breadth of her interests, her knowledge show in a way she usually plays down a little on the job. This is something different.

(She might be a little tipsy.)

(Or she might not be.) 

Her smile is dazzling and unwavering. She sparkles like some magnificent, multifaceted jewel. She dances, skirt billowing, through the narrow confines of the party, pressing champagne into people’s hands. She leads an almost entirely successfully three-part-harmony rendition of “Happy Birthday,” conducting with gusto.

She cuts the cake with deft movements and kisses the frosting from the corner of his mouth after she feeds him the first bite. She mobilizes a plate brigade to distribute, then grows impatient and flits around to do it herself. 

She chats with their dear friends and with his mother’s students, with their coworkers and his mother and daughter. She speaks in conspiratorial whispers and peals of laughter, with her head thrown back and the full, ravishing beauty of her bare neck and shoulders on display.

And in between it all, she sweeps her way back to him before too long. Always before too long, and she clacks the heels of her patent-leather mary janes on the slate tile floor like a little girl who is infinitely delighted with her first pair of grown-up shoes. She drops next to him, she perches on his good knee with her arms draped carelessly around his neck. She finds him where he’s propped up against a wall, the kitchen island, Esposito, and slings an arm around his shoulders or sneaks up behind him and slips both arms around his waist. 

She brings her lips far closer to his ear than even the noise of a party in full swing necessitates and murmurs, _So you like it?_ Sometimes, it’s a question. Others, it’s a crowing declaration with nipping teeth and a smoldering _got you good_ look. Still others, it’s shy and breathlessly relieved, as though she has ever failed at anything in her life. As though she has ever even failed to excel, but she might not remember that right now.

(She might be a little tipsy.)

(Or it might be something else entirely.)

The party winds down at last, but the magic of it holds. People linger, but there’s no trace of the melancholy that too often infuses the long goodbyes on a night like this. The guests laugh and slap each other on the back. They argue, then come to an agreement that this present was the most outrageous and that one was the sweetest. They insist that this one is something no one but that person would have thought of in a million years, and that there are a thousand and one uses for this, that, and the other thing, even for him. Even for the man who has everything, and he is definitely that man tonight. 

She’s quieter by then. Her smile is softer, and she keeps closer by. She keeps hold of his hand, or makes sure to curl one finger through a belt loop. When she can’t keep close—when there’s one quick thing to do or one last set of air kisses to exchange by the door if this person or that person is _ever _going to leave, she glances over her shoulder to catch his eye and give him a wink and a not-so-solemn promise that she’ll be back soon.

When it’s down to the two of them, plus his mother and Alexis, she leaves him for a moment. She fends him off with a raised palm and a _don’t even _glare as the the three of them bend their heads together.

His mother will spend the night right here in their borrowed theater—_to give a certain birthday boy and his lady love_ their privacy, as she had announced to all and sundry at numerous points throughout the evening. Alexis will help put a few last things to rights, then head back to her dorm in a car Kate has called for her, and of all the hundred million details she’s attended to, that’s the one that chokes him up. It’s also the one that makes the three of them roll their eyes in unison.

She comes to collect him when they’ve said all there is to say for tonight and smiled wide at one another. She curls her fingers over his on the cross bar of his crutches as they make their way, wordless and utterly comfortable in it, across the street to the loft.

She sighs in the elevator. She tips her body against the back wall and plants her palms wide. Her eyes close and she hums to herself as she swings one foot, then the other. The elevator dings and she spins her way out, twirling through the doors exactly at the moment they glide open.

“C’mon, Castle.” She catches hold of the wall and leans back in. “Time for bed.”

She dances ahead of him down the hall and turns the key in the lock with a flourish. She gets him inside and snatches his crutches away. She crowds him against the door as it closes with a bang and kisses him hard.

“Beckett,” he gasps when there’s no breath at all left in him. “Are you okay?”

“Okay?” She arches an eyebrow at him. “No,” she says emphatically. “No. No. No.” She punctuates each denial with the pop of one shirt button. “Not okay. _Happy.”_

“Happy,” he repeats, understanding at last. “Oh.”

(She’s not tipsy.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, that’s 100. Sincere thank yous to everyone who’s sent kind words or even just taken the time to read them. 


	20. Infraction—The Fast and the Furriest (5 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She taps lightly on the door, then waits. She always taps lightly. She always waits, even though the key is in her hand. There’s no need for this bit of theater. He’s told her, in a small cautious voice. His mother has told her with sweeping gestures. Even Alexis has told her with a curious look as she rushes out the door as Kate stands on the other side, tapping lightly and waiting, that there’s no need at all. They’ve all told her that it doesn’t matter what time of day or night, who’s home or who isn’t, but she taps. She waits.

> _ “Why not live in the possible?”   
—Richard Castle, The Fast and the Furriest (5 x 20)_
> 
> * * *

****She taps lightly on the door, then waits. She always taps lightly. She always waits, even though the key is in her hand. There’s no need for this bit of theater. He’s told her, in a small cautious voice. His mother has told her with sweeping gestures. Even Alexis has told her with a curious look as she rushes out the door as Kate stands on the other side, tapping lightly and waiting, that there’s no need at all. They’ve all told her that it doesn’t matter what time of day or night, who’s home or who isn’t, but she taps. She waits.

She waits a little longer tonight. She taps twice. It’s always a little absurd, and she knows that. It’s a little more absurd right now, but she’s breaking a rule no one in the world but her knows about. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, a combo move she usually reserves for him, but she deserves it tonight. She waits a few breaths more, then shoves the key in the lock and turns, timing her push down on the handle just right so the mechanism doesn’t stick on her. It’s embarrassing when it sticks on her and one of them rushes to her aid and tell her the trick to it all over again.

“Hello?” she calls out timidly. She always calls out. Probably always timidly. Probably even_ more_timidly tonight. Because of the rule no one in the world but her knows about.

“Kate!” Martha swivels around on her stool at the breakfast bar. She looks astonished, confused as to why Kate is there. “Darling, have you finally realized that you don’t need to knock?”

Okay, maybe she doesn’t look astonished. Maybe she doesn’t look confused.

“I knocked twice!” Kate says swiftly. It comes out somewhere between defensive and accusatory.

“Well.” Martha is momentarily flummoxed, but recovers.“I guess I was just caught up in the text I’m working on for my beginner class.” She waves a thick script with half the pages rolled back. “I’m so sorry I didn’t hear the door.”

“No, no. I know you weren’t expecting—I know Rick is—isn’t—” She crosses halfway to the kitchen and stops. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she finishes, sounding slightly less convincing than the average telemarketer, though it’s nothing but the truth. She’s extremely sorry and she feels like the world’s biggest bother.

“Katherine Beckett.” Martha pours herself off the stool and closes the gap between them to take both Kate’s hands in hers. “You are never a bother, and you do not have to be expected to be welcome.” 

“Thank you, Martha.” She hangs her head, blushing and biting back what feels like her ten thousandth apology for the ten thousand and first iteration of this conversation. “But I _am_ at least interrupting you, so I’ll …”

“You are a _welcome _interruption,” Martha replies with an arched brow. “But I was hoping to finish breaking down the end of this act,” she admits.

“I’ll be—you won’t even know I’m here.” She casts a glance over her shoulder. She summons up a parting smile and makes a run for it.

There’s a moment when she second guesses herself. She pulls parallel with the front door on her beeline for the bedroom, and there’s a _second_ when the rule that no one in the world but her knows about rears up, and she thinks about jerking that door right open and dashing out into the night.

It’s not exactly bravery that carries her through it. It’s the fact that Martha has almost, but not quite, managed to stifle her laughter at antics that must seem utterly nonsensical, because they_are_ utterly nonsensical.

It’s embarrassment and self-disgust that win the day, and she’s through the alcove and into the bedroom. She’s pulling off her work clothes and folding them as small and neatly as she can and hiding them away. She’s retrieving the tiny, light-weight things she sleeps in from their hiding spot and clambering into bed.

She lies there, stiff, with the covers up to her chin, and dithers about the lights. She wants them off, of course. She’s exhausted. She’s sore from the hike, and the tumble into the stupid pit, and the Herculean effort to clamber out of it, and the whole reason she’s breaking the rule tonight is she just falls asleep faster here.

She wants the delicious, total black of this room, but with the lights off, she’s an unknown lump under the covers in the dark, and what happens when he comes home? What if he screams or calls the cops or attacks the unknown? What if he’s set a trap to keep lawless rule breakers out of the bed? She considers the options. She runs every ridiculous nightmare scenario. She argues with herself about which is the _most _ridiculous. 

And she falls asleep somewhere along the way.

“What?” She wakes with a jerk and a shout. She wakes with one fist flailing wildly. _“What?” _

“Hey, hey.” A gentle hand catches her fist in mid-flight. “Kate, it’s me.”

“Me who?” she grumbles.

“That’s not how knock-knock jokes go, you know.” He—_me_ seems to be a he—laughs softly and sets her hand on her chest. 

“I’m not here.” She frowns and cracks one eye open. His smiling face comes into focus, but it’s not as reassuring as it should be. She has the annoying sense that there’s something she needs to explain, and she’s doing a bad job of it. “Not _supposed_ to be.”

“I disagree, Detective.” There’s sudden cold as the blankets pull away from her body, then sudden warmth as he settles in close to her. “Strongly disagree.”

“Not _supposed_ to be,” she repeats emphatically. She flops in his general direction. She makes a fist and means to pound it against his shoulder so he’ll listen, but it ends up tangled in whatever shirt he’s wearing. It ends up pulling him closer. “Yesterday,” she says, right in his face. There are two of him, one of him, two of him. She’s so tired, but she has to explain.

“Yesterday?” He presses a kiss to her forehead, then stops short. He pulls back to look at her.“Oh. Yesterday. You stayed here yesterday.”

“Yes,” she says, struggling with it. With the next part of the thing she has to explain. “Today.”

“And today you’re not supposed to be here.” He nods. She nods. She feels him smile against her forehead. “It’s tomorrow now,” he says. He drags his fingers through he hair, raising a delicious shiver on her scalp. “Does that help?”

“Help. No.” She tries to shake her head, but it’s so heavy, and the pillow is so thick and soft and perfect. “Not the rule.”

“Not the rule,” he repeats, his voice a rocking sing-song. “Maybe … maybe the rule is dumb?”

“Dumb!” She smiles, infinitely relieved as she lets out a breath. She takes in another and the comforting scent of him with it. It’s the answer to a question. To a backwards knock-knock joke. Her fingers curl tighter around the knot of his shirt. “Pretty dumb rule.” 


	21. A Knight on the Rim—The Squab and the Quail (5 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he’s pretty sure he has things figured out. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he is sure he’s screwing everything up. Sundays are devoted to Outlook Hazy, Ask Again Later and other Magic Eight Ball–level prognostications.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: In the US, the ABC network swapped out “Still” for this episode because of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. This episode ran after “The Fast and the Furriest,” and then “Still” ran after this one. That’s how I originally saw them, and that’s also the order on the DVDs/digital versions of Season 5. Thus, even though “Still” was intended to be 5 x 21, this has always been 5 x 21 for me, and honestly, I cannot make sense of this episode if it followed “Still,” so please forgive me for sticking to this ordering.

> _“I’m gonna need your full attention.”  
—Kate Beckett, The Squab and the Quail (5 x 21)_

* * *

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he’s pretty sure he has things figured out. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he is sure he’s screwing everything up. Sundays are devoted to _Outlook Hazy, Ask Again Later _and other Magic Eight Ball–level prognostications.

But Eric Vaughn is Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday as far as the eye can see. Eric Vaughn disrupts the schedule—the balance—entirely.

Except Eric Vaughn isn’t the problem, really. For all that the smooth-talking, clout-packing, kiss-attempting bastard is a flash point, he’s not the one responsible for this interruption to our regularly scheduled programming. He’s off the LSL, for sure, but that’s about the fact that up close, the guy is kind of like the wormy pick-up artists from a few years ago, only with Venture Capital behind him.

As far as the disruption goes, it’s hard to say who is responsible. Not _difficult to determine,_unfortunately, just … hard to admit. But staring at the ceiling—because he’s tired of staring at the back of his eyelids—with the scent of rose petals still rising up from the sheets, he lands on the fact that he has himself to blame. Mostly.

The _mostly_ isn’t him being defensive. In fact, he’d give up the _mostly_ in a heartbeat, because it’s the _mostly_ that scares him.

He knows he screws up. That’s what Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are for: Recalibration. They are for self-examination and course correction, because there is no one on the _planet _who appreciates the kind of balancing act he is trying to pull off.

He is head over heels, world without end in love with her. He has been. He will be. And he has assumed from the beginning that the greatest danger he poses to their relationship is being … too much.

He’s been sure from the start that he’ll be the one to tip their secret to the outside world, because he is so obviously crazy about her. He’s been sure that a look, a touch, a gesture, a stolen kiss when he just can’t stand _not_ kissing her for one more second will be what outs them to Gates, although on Monday, Wednesday, Friday he is reasonably certain that they are the ten-year-olds trying to squeeze out one more_ I Believe in Santa _year, and Gates is the increasingly skeptical parent.

He’s been sure that he’ll buy her something or take her somewhere or do something that’s so grand a gesture—so that Page-Six Guy with the mansion and_ arrangements_ in the Hamptons—that she’ll hate it. But that’s not where the real danger lies. The real danger—the thing he’s been terrified of from the start—is that he’ll overwhelm her with how he feels about her.

Because he knows she has a balancing act of her own going on. He will never, for an instant, regret the fact that they are finally together, but he knows the circumstances of that_ finally_ are far from ideal. He knows that she’s been working her way beyond the person she became in an instant when she was nineteen years old. He knows she doesn’t trust or open herself or accept care from anyone easily.

He knows there are ways—important ways—in which they sit at oblique angles to one another, at least for now, and he’s been trying. He’s been trying so hard not to be too much, and now in the rose-petal aftermath of Eric Vaughn, he thinks he’s been not enough.

He’s worked so hard to give her space that he’s somehow missed the fact that she hasn’t been asking for it so much—that she wants it less. He reviews the evidence, and he can’t imagine how he’s missed the fact that she’s here most nights. She’s silly and over-the-top sexy in one of his French blue shirts, or stretched out and schlubby on the couch. She’s here even when she’s exasperated with him, and he feels like an idiot for not seeing it. 

But feeling like an idiot—_being_ an idiot—isn’t the whole of the problem. He circles back to the the mostly that scares him. He can stop being an idiot. He can stop being an idiot so often, anyway, but there are pitfalls that have more to do with how damnably sidelong she is about everything than they do with his penchant for being too much.

He stares at the back of his eyelids—because he’s tired of staring at the ceiling—and gets lost in the fading scent of rose petals. He reaches out for her, rigidly confined to her side of the bed tonight, and hooks his pinky around hers.

He thinks about waking her to tell her he loves the fact that she’s here most nights, to tell her that she practically lives here, so she might as well all-the-way live here. He thinks about waking her to tell her he loves her, he has loved her, he will love her, always.

Be he’s too much, and she’s damnably sidelong about everything.


	22. Bearing—Still (5 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She feels out of herself. She feels like a jack-in-the-box left on the shelf for too long, then suddenly sprung, and now her thoughts, her emotions, her physical sensations are bobbing on an overtaxed spring well outside her body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Just in case you didn’t see the note on the previous chapter—although the original intention was for “Still” to precede “The Squab and the Quail,” that’s not how they aired in the US, and it’s not how they’re ordered on the DVDs/digital versions, so these stories are arranged in US-airing order.

> _“And the disarming process? How long does that usually take?”  
—Richard Castle, Still (5 x 22) _

* * *

****She feels out of herself. She feels like a jack-in-the-box left on the shelf for too long, then suddenly sprung, and now her thoughts, her emotions, her physical sensations are bobbing on an overtaxed spring well outside her body.

“I’m too tired for life-affirming sex,” she declares. She is belly down on the bed with her limbs flung wide. She’s still in her clothes, her shoes, her watch. She feels the phantom weight of her vest, her holster. Everything is stiff and sticky at the same time. It’s plastered unpleasantly to her body with the salt of dried sweat until it’s a second, unwelcome skin. The rank, penetrating smell of fear and resignation fills her nose and mouth. “Too gross.”

“Never. Never too gross.” He perches on the edge of the bed and runs a feather-light hand down her back, from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. “But too tired is legitimate. We can take a rain check on life-affirming sex.”

“Lanie’s mad.” The observation pops right out of her mouth and takes a seat on the bed with the two of them. “No one told her. Breaking news at the gym. She’s mad.”

“Ex post facto panic,” he says. His hand continues its to and fro, up her spine and down again. The occasional sweep along shoulder blade and hip. “She’s not mad at you.”

“My dad is.” She summons the energy to turn her head. To rest her cheek on the pillow so she can stare down Lanie’s righteous fury where it sits next to her dad’s totally unnecessary devastation. “Martha is. All that whisper-yelling.”

She closes her eyes and hears it all over again. It makes pictures on the dome of the world inside her mind. It’s like tight-blossom fireworks eating up the living room air. She hears it and remembers how she lay here on the bed, useless, like a jack-in-the-box that might not survive another wind-up. 

“Whisper-yelling.” He lets out a laugh that sounds tight and pained, but the motion of his hand along her body is constant. He leans close to feather a kiss along her hairline. “Your dad was just … dad scared. It’s a thing. And Mother’s whisper-yelling was for me. Nobody is mad at you, Kate.”

“I’m mad at_ you!”_ She’s yelling-yelling, though she supposes it doesn’t sound like that in the outside world. She doesn’t even know where the short, sharp burst of energy comes from, when she’s too tired for anything. It’s gone soon enough, though. It’s gone before she has a chance to interrogate it, and she’s lolling on the spring again. “You almost died. Stupid. You weren’t supposed to almost die. You were supposed to go.”

“I did go.” His thumb, the heel of his hand find a sullen, screaming knot north-by-northwest of her right shoulder blade. They go to war against it, relentless. “Came back with coffee.”

“That was the worst,” she says. She closes her eyes and sees the blue Greek-key design, but the coffee isn’t what she means. She means the way the whole place shimmered green with relief when he came back. _That _was the worst, because she’d conjured him up from the black grit a the bottom of her soul. From fear and weakness, she’d willed him to come back to her. “I was scared, Castle. I was so scared.”

“Me—me too.” There’s a quaver in his voice for the first time. His hand falters, then begins again with renewed purpose. He sets to work freeing her hair from the elastic band keeping it contained. “It’s over now, though. And they lived happily ever after, the end. Over.” 

His fingers work gently at the agonizing knot of tension that’s left when her hair is finally loose. More of her spills out into the world as he breaks it into tiny waves of flickering pain.

“I made it to the end this time,” she finds herself saying. She has to work to turn the words over as they emerge. She has to push aside everything about Lanie, her dad, Martha. “All the way to the end of the shooting.”

“… the shooting?”

His fingers travel over her scalp without interruption, but she hears the ellipsis. She encounters the parts of him that are usually packed neatly away and she’s sorry for the fact that his insides are sprung, too. She wills her own hand to move. Her starfish fingers crawl across the rumpled expanse of the bed to find his thigh.

“The end of it,” she says, hoping the urgency falls in the right place. “When you said you loved me.” She digs her fingers into fabric and muscle. She tries to will her meaning into being that way. “I never made it to the end before.”

“You knew, though, right?” The vast expanse of his palm cups the base of her skull. He turns her face a fraction of an inch toward his. What he means and what she means are like ships passing in the night. “You knew even if you never made it to the end?”

“I knew. Way before then.” Shame unfurls as she says it. Frustration. “And after. Even when—”

“Even when?” he prompts. His fingers go to work on her forehead now, smoothing the furrows there.   
“It’s not an almost-died thing.” The words are a clumsy, inelegant sigh of relief. “I love you.” That’s something cool and silver rolling off her tongue and sliding down her throat at the same time. “It was never an almost-died thing.”

“It wasn’t,” he murmurs as he turns swiftly toward her. He slides his body under and along hers. His fingers skim down her ribs and over her hip and across her back leaving ease wherever they travel. “It was a first-time-out-loud thing.”

“Exactly.” She buries her face against his chest. “That’s it exactly.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I never know which episodes are going to resist. This one did, and this sketch came out very strangely.


	23. Frames Per Second—The Human Factor (5 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a case where they’ve been pushed to the margins from the very beginning, he has the strong sense that she is unusually present, relevant, resonant in the murder of Dale Tanner.

> _“There’s a camera here.”  
—Kate Beckett, The Human Factor (5 x 23)_

* * *

For a case where they’ve been pushed to the margins from the very beginning, he has the strong sense that she is unusually present, relevant, resonant in the murder of Dale Tanner.

The notion preoccupies him as he gives the shower’s taps a pair of expertly synchronized twists to let the water warm as he undresses. He’s only just out of his shirt when he remembers that she’s promised to join him—to be present, relevant, resonant right here. He smiles to himself and reaches back in to back the hot water off just a smidge. She likes the water a little cooler. He takes a last sip of wine and steps under the spray, rolling wine, thoughts, and words around on his tongue, in his mind.

He dips his head back to let the water pound against his scalp. The heat and rhythm of it work in concert to untangle things and let his mind sift through all the ways she looms particularly large in this case. Shawn Tanner is the first to rise up. It’s unpleasant, to say the least, even though he knows all too well how often murder is a family affair. But his mind has been mulling over the uncomfortably resonant theme since the two of them worked in tandem to secure a confession from the angry young man: _It had to be hard … A crusader who put his mission above all else. _

It’s not just the direct line to who she was—who she has been too recently—it’s the parent–child thing. Father–son, mother–daughter. It’s something he’s played with in where he’s taken the long arc of the books—Cynthia Heat’s call to adventure and young Nikki’s resentment, her sense of abandonment, irrational maybe. Unfair, but real nonetheless, and something he knows in broad strokes, from halting things she’s told him, she’s at least touched on in therapy.

And with the water beating down on him, Shawn Tanner’s narrative, the way it twines around her fictional mother’s, brings a second epiphany. It is—or was—a prophecy for his own life, he realizes. Father–son. He laughs aloud, a bitter sound he doesn’t like that bounces off the tiles. He cheats the hot water higher for a moment and turns his body in toward the stream. He lets the water rain down over his face and pushes the thought of Shawn Tanner away. 

But the case won’t leave him alone. He looks at the water streaming over his hands. He’s itching to write, and it’s not just that his habits, such as they are, have completely unspooled. They’re no match for the temptation of her near-constant presence, but it’s not just time elapsed. It’s things about this case—her and this case—that have a hold on him.

It’s the way the mechanics of it managed to bring very best of her into sharp relief. His heart pounds in tandem with the water as he remembers the fire in her eyes from the second that Guerrero tried to intimidate her, that Stack told her she’d never find Warburg. He thinks of her digging in harder at every roadblock, every manipulation, and it all calls up his own long-ago declaration. It calls up the first time he cast about for something that might capture an iota of truth about her, and the only thing that would do—even a little bit—was _extraordinary. _

The recollection brings him around to Stack. There’s nothing in him, he thinks with his teeth coming together hard. There’s nothing productive in the exaggerated, shadowy, gravel-voiced caricature, and he bristles again at the oddly hungry way the man stared at her through the observation window and tried to tell him—_him_—anything novel about her. He fusses with the water temperature again. He tilts his face further into the stream. He’d like to wash Stack away, as much as Shawn Tanner, but there’s something. There’s _something. _

She banishes whatever it is. Her arrival in a swirl of cooler air and skin suddenly pressed against his drives out everything else and draws a sharp gasp from him. 

“Got the drop on you,” she says. She smiles into his shoulder blade and gives his hip a sharp pinch. “Writing in the fog again?”

“Mmm. Not writing.” He’s telling himself as much as her that his scattered thoughts aren’t there yet. He turns his own body and hers with it to share the wide spray between them. He studies the drops of water dotting her cheeks and forehead and the way the case still hangs on her. He runs slick palms over her shoulders and down her arms to take hold of her hands. “Thinking about you.” He leans down to kiss her. “About how you see roses.”


	24. Link by Link—Watershed (5 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is trying to think of nothing, to focus and navigate this experience, opportunity, crossroads. She is trying to filter out noise, factors, complications, eyes forward, ears trained on whatever else is out there.

> _“No. It was always just her.”  
—Ziff Falgrad, Watershed (5 x 24)_
> 
> * * *

She is trying to think of nothing, to focus and navigate this experience, opportunity, crossroads. She is trying to filter out noise, factors, complications, eyes forward, ears trained on whatever else is out there.

She is trying to think of nothing, but she thinks, of all things, of Lee Travis’s string of paper dolls. With her elbows drawn in against her body and her spine rigid in an attempt to make herself small enough for an an airplane middle seat to contain her, she thinks about their sharp lines and perfect symmetry unfolding in a shaft of light through a filthy window. She feels like those paper dolls, like countless versions of the same story, each incomplete, held together by the most fragile points of contact.

There is the razor-cut outline on the end, with only one hand to hold. That’s the version on the plane, there and back. It’s the iteration of her that Stack saw in the ten seconds he could see anything about her. It’s the version that stood before a wall of windows in tailored navy anonymity and matched Freedman’s handshake pump for bone-crushing pump. It’s who Gates sees—a _meant to be doing,_ an _if only,_ an _I would have killed for._ It’s the version of her who wasn’t lying when she told Freedman she knew why she was there.

And then there’s the version of her who _is_ lying at every turn. The version who won’t call it lying. She’s in the middle, and she parses and litigates every syllable that does and does not come out of her mouth. It _is _nothing, and her phone _was _off. It’s not a lie, it’s an omission, and nobody—not a soul alive—tells everyone everything. And anyway, this is a long shot, it’s seeing what’s out there, it’s not courting drama every second of her life, and it _is_ her life—_her_ life—and how dare he try to make it about them?

She—that particular two-dimensional rendition—has tight hold of the hands on either side of her. She white-knuckles it with fatalism. She has already decided that talking about _it,_ about _them,_ about _where they are going,_ what they are, could, should, would be is, at best, a pointless exercise. She has already decided that talking about any of it _will_ be a bad thing.

It’s a version of her creased with age and faded with waiting. She has watched with sinister eagerness for him to be all that he’s always seemed to be. She has kept—still keeps—a sharp lookout for every foible and misstep—his, hers, theirs. She hisses _I told you so_ and_ It won’t be long now _in the dark of night. She has kept an eye out for the exact moment their partnership—their soul-deep friendship—begins to rot and crack and crumble to miserable pieces and then to nothing, punishment for the sin of reaching out for more.

She is the version that has long since decided that someone always leaves, and it’s her turn. _Her _turn, and she must choose, he will make her choose, and even if he doesn’t, he will hate her. She is the version in black and white that clamors _It’s one or the other, one or the other, one or the other._ Someone always leaves.

In between, there are too many versions to count, every one flat and glossy with a razor-cut outline. There’s the one Lanie treads lightly with, though it’s more than she deserves in her adolescent absurdity. The one that Esposito extends a hand toward again and again, though it’s neither in his nature nor in hers to keep trying when they both know she’ll slap it away every time.

There’s the one whose heart breaks at every sweet moment with Castle that feels like the last bell tolling—every time they finish each other’s sentences, and he smiles at her like he knows her mind, her heart, her soul in its entirety. And there’s the one who knows that her dad means to shock her to the core—to shock her out of this black spiral of her own making—when he tells her that she hides in her work, that she always does this, that she’ll have to live with it—with Castle hating her. She knows exactly what he’s doing, what they are all trying to do, and none of it is of any use to her at all.

At the far end, with only one hand to hold, there is a Kate under glass. She is a story high up on a shelf with an uncracked spine. She is shut up tight between tantalizing, untouchable silver covers. She is a Kate who could have been more if not for that January night, and the Kate who has wanted to be more since the day she met him. She is a Kate who has been silenced, neglected, deferred, denied, and she is pounding her fists against the glass, even now.

She is a Kate wracked with sorrow when her dad says that her mother would be proud, because she knows that’s not entirely true. She knows her mother would have loved, forgiven, poked and prodded and held her through all of this, and in the end, she would have said in her crisp, no-nonsense way, _Katie, what’s this all about? Why would you do this to yourself? _

She is _the _Kate. The woman who could have_ both–and–more–all_ if only every version stretching out from the center, every other hand linked to hand linked to hand weren’t some kind of coward.

She is the Kate he sees, has always seen, will always see, no matter what happens next.

She is the Kate he has come to meet. The one he calls out for, down on one knee with a ring in his hand. _Whatever happens, whatever you decide, Katherine Houghton Beckett, will you marry me?  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Not gonna lie, this was a very tough slog that involved me roaming the house looking for my copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut at 3 AM. I know it’s a lousy ending, but it’s an ending, and I thank you all for reading.


End file.
